Some Tivo Functionality In Cable & Satellite Set-top Boxes? Forget It!

Some cable and satellite companies are coming out with some Tivo-type
functionality in their set-top boxes, but that functionality pales in
comparison to Tivo and is less cost effective. Only 1/3 of cable
customers bother to subscribe to digital cable which they must do if
they want some Tivo-type functionality. The cost/benefit ratio is much
in favor of Tivo over getting some Tivo-like functions from a set-top
box. The cable and satellite companies are also a bit late in their
roll-out of this stuff. Whenever these articles appear, Tivo investors
sell off their holdings for no reason. The average consumer will
figure out that they'd rather have their own Tivo box and be more in
control than with a set-top box. With a set-top box you never know if
the cable or satellite company is going to raise the charges. The
majority of Tivo owners buy the lifetime subscription and don't have
to worry about monthly charges increasing. In my house we have both
cable and satellite feeding into Tivo -- a single set-top box would
limit our flexibility.

So many people continue to come home from work, turn on the TV and
find nothing on that they want to watch even though they have many
stations available. If you're a digital cable subscriber (meaning you
have a phone line into your cable box) you can use Video On Demand to
order some movie or whatever to watch. People pay a price to do that
because it's easier to do that than to program a VCR to tape desired
shows and then try to find them on the tape when they get home. People
are finally getting the word from Tivo users that programming is now
super easy. When you get home from work you just look at your Tivo's
"Now Playing" list and choose something you'd like to see. You begin
watching *nothing* live because doing so means you can't skip through
commercials.

The people who say there's nothing worth watching on TV are those who
are still "channel surfing" which quickly leads to total frustration.
With Tivo, you don't look at what's on right now -- you look at what's
on over the next two weeks and make sure you record anything that even
might be interesting
(something from the History Channel, some shows from the Food Network
a few sitcoms and some late night shows). Then take a look at the late
night show and choose, for example, to only watch Jay Leno's opening
jokes and one guest interview -- you just skip past all the
un-interesting stuff and watch about
15 minutes of interesting stuff, then hit "delete". Now that's
efficiency!