When Tivo Dies

By Married Media Archives
Cover image for  article: When Tivo Dies

What’s a time-shifter to do... when their Tivo dies? This has been my plight over the past nearly two months (it seems like an eternity!) and it has impacted my life in many ways.  None of them good.

Looking back now, I can identify the day, the moment that my beloved Tivo began his downward slide.  On the morning of Sept. 4, Patti Scialfa played songs from her new album on The Today Show. Being a devout fan of any and all things Bruce and/or the E-Street Band, I set my faithful Tivo up to record the event, planning to watch it when I got home. As soon as I got home that night, I plunked down on the couch, grabbed my remote and fired up the tube and Tivo.  As my TV picture warmed up, I found NOT my Tivo list menu on my screen, and not Patti either, but the pixilated, frozen image of “The Teenager Who Was Thrown Off The Plane For Inappropriate Apparel! “

What the he-**?” I loudly declared. My remote was no longer in control of the set. The girl in her mini was fixed on my screen. The only solution was to reboot, to unplug my Tivo from its power source. This cleared the image and sent Tivo into a power-up sequence that involves re-loading the guide information upon which all Tivo programming is based. Roughly ten minutes later, I was watching, delivered finally to my screen, a live HD picture.  My remote now worked again and I quickly went to my list of recorded shows. No Patti.  Apparently, the “freeze” happened before the recording was scheduled to start.  Darn.  Thank goodness for streaming video of the Today Show Concert Series. I was able to still see Patti’s performance, just one day later and at work.

After that day, the pixilation and picture-freezing kept happening, and as the days passed, it happened more and more often. Sometimes, we would get lucky and we’d be able to watch or record a full evening’s programming before it would happen. Sometimes, it would happen 3 times in an hour long show. We talked to our Direct TV provider; we talked to our home theatre installer. “Reboot it”, they said, “And if it still keeps doing it, your hard drive is fried and you have to buy a new one.”

When you work in our business, you can generally count on at least these two facts. You love TV (or you wouldn’t have gone into media to begin with.) and you work a lot of late evenings. Yes, we are the ones pulling up those averages of Tivo usage that the study on the home page described.  

What then, does one do when their schedule is crazed and their Tivo can not be relied upon? When time after time, you come home to find the Tivo immobile and that nothing you programmed has recorded? For one thing, you become the world’s worst TV blogger, and I apologize profusely for this. Second, you start looking for “alternative” ways to view your favorite shows. I’m here to tell ya, it’s not as easy as it sounds.

I have learned that while ABC does offer streaming video full episodes of most of their shows, that my browser on my home computer does not accommodate their new viewer. (My home computer is a sad story for another time) NBC offers a few shows, but not the ones I want, and Fox offers EVERYTHING except House, theONEshow I DO want. So, I have been resorting to viewing bits and pieces of shows on YouTube, reading the synopses available on MSNBC, TV Without Pity, TV.com, and other fansites (like www.HouseMD-guide.com), and literally trying to piece together my shattered TV-viewing life.

Another painful part of this process has been coming to terms with parting with all that is currently stored on my Tivo. As this is basically a “hard drive crash”, I can no longer retrieve and dub down any of the things I wanted to save forever that are on my soon-to-be-buried machine. Goodbye to the Cardinals celebrating their World Series win last year, the last dance of Chief Illiniwek, Live Bruce and Lyle Lovett performances, and countless episodes of House. Let this be a lesson to all of us.

I wish I could say that I’ve been reading more or exercising more as a result, but the late work hours didn’t really allow for that either. I DID see Bruce Springsteen perform in Chicago TWICE last week... an experience far better than anything TV could ever offer, and while my voice now sounds a LOT like Kathleen Turner’s... worth it beyond words.

Today (10/30) Direct TV arrives at my house to install a new Tivo. The siege will soon be over. In addition to getting a new DVR, they tell us that this new box will allow us to receive many more HD channels than we were getting before. I look forward to that.  I’m off this weekend to a family wedding, and then hope to be back up and running.... watching, recording, and writing... just in time for November sweeps. Talk to you then!

Copyright ©2024 MediaVillage, Inc. All rights reserved. By using this site you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.