Let me just preface this post with a little history.

I’ve had Tivo in my life for a long time. My husband and I got our first Tivo in 1999. We loved it soooo much that I sold my car and carpooled with husband for 3 months so we could save up and give one to everyone in our family.

In recent years we’d been sucked into the DirectTV Tivo’s. Last fall we bought one that was HD. The only one. Being an early adopter has it’s perils. We found out that DirectTV was coming out with it’s own DVR and the Tivo model would not be supported. This made us upset. We had just bought it. Also, it never worked with our VOIP (voice over internet protocol) phone so the software kept degrading. So, since DirectTV had made us unhappy campers as customers, we got cable. If you read my previous post, you can see how that’s working out….

Anyway, on to today. So with cable we had DVRs from the cable company. After Tivo, these DVRs were not such a good experience. They had awful interfaces for finding programs to record and a killer feature, if the show wasn’t on for a couple of weeks, it just forgot about it! So we had to remember to remind our DVR to record programs we liked. Nothing like having electronic equipment with memory issues.

So we went down to basic cable and returned their DVRs. We needed to replace the barely passable cable company DVRs (happily). We were so excited, we were finally going to have Tivo again.

So we went to Best Buy and got Tivo. Everything was happy, happy until we got home and tried to connect it. You have to set it up with a phone connection. Not just any phone connection, but a land line. It has full capability to connect to the Internet, but you can’t set it up that way. You have to freakin call.

I just kept thinking. So, this is a company that makes products for early adopters. Don’t most early adopters have VOIP? Don’t at least some of them? And what about people that just have cell phones.

So we actually had to sit in our living room and brainstorm how we were going to get our Tivo set up. Because once it’s set up, we can use the internet for updates. So, we went through our list of friends to figure out who had a land line. Less than half of our friends do. We did find a good friend with a land line and we’ll go get it set up tomorrow, but WTF is up with that?

So for now, Tivo no go.