Tuesday, March 8, 2005
TiVo Versus MCE Versus my Cable Company
Posted by James Fee in "ARTICLE" @ 11:00 AM
"These are rough times for a TiVo fanatic. The company and its groundbreaking box are getting squeezed into irrelevance. On the one side, cable companies offer their own DVR boxes, which may not be elegant but are easy and cheap. On the other side, you have PC-based solutions like Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, which do more than a TiVo and are improving by leaps and bounds every year. I’ve been thinking about this topic for the past month, after I received a weekly Circuits e-mail on the topic from David Pogue, a sharp and funny writer for the New York Times. Anyway, David’s thesis was that TiVo (the company) isn’t doomed, because TiVo (the gadget) is so refined and elegant and ingenious that nothing should be allowed to compete with it. And to prove it, he provides a laundry list of features that make the TiVo so hip it hurts. The list comes with a qualifier, of course: “I do realize that many rival boxes have some of these features. But none that I know of offers all of these them — and especially not in such an easy-to-use, brilliantly designed software package.” Well, it’s a very good list. And since I am in the enviable position of owning a Series 1 TiVo, two PCs running Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, and a high-definition Explorer 8300HD digital video recorder from Scientific Atlanta, I thought it might be instructive to compare all three."
Not surprisingly, Ed thinks that MCE is the pick of the three, but for ease of use, TiVo still rules. Until MCE is as easy to plug in and get working as TiVo (or any similar DVR), it won't be as popular. BUT, if you want/need more control, MCE is by far the better way to go.
Not surprisingly, Ed thinks that MCE is the pick of the three, but for ease of use, TiVo still rules. Until MCE is as easy to plug in and get working as TiVo (or any similar DVR), it won't be as popular. BUT, if you want/need more control, MCE is by far the better way to go.
