I'd agree with you completely, except for 2 things:

Both of your points are excellent.

I forget that not everybody watches television the way I do... I don't subscribe to cable TV, I just watch what the local stations offer, and their signal quality is marginal even with a gigantic outdoor antenna on my roof. I find that recording at the lowest quality setting on the TiVo is indistinguishable from watching it live, so the quality issue never even occurred to me.

And since I only watch local TV, the concept of archiving something on a more or less permanent basis never occurred to me either. I mean, I should archive some dreary sit-com or mind-numbing drama that will be repeated in six months as a re-run anyway?

What I love about TiVo is that I haven't watched a television commercial since January. Which, now that I think about it, may not be such an advantage -- the commercials are probably more entertaining than most of the programming I get...

It's nice having the TiVo "take care of me" by recording anything and everything it thinks I might like -- once I've told it the kind of programming I like to watch, it hunts it down and records it for me with no intervention on my part, so I never miss anything I want to see.

As TiVo says in their advertising, once you have TiVo, you won't watch television anymore. You'll watch TiVO.

tanstaafl.

"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"