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It's just a consumer-electronics box that looks like any other consumer-electronics box. It's gray with a gray remote control and it will change the way you watch television. So why am I writing a web page about something whose sole raison d'etre is to change the way one watches television?
Because it's the first time in a long time that I have seen a computer system really done right.
Usually, once a gadget crosses from consumer electronics to computers it becomes hopelessly a pain in the ass to use and all hope is lost. This happened when the compact disk (CD) and the video cassette recorder (VCR) spawned the digital video disk (DVD).
TiVo is different. I want you to imagine a hardware gizmo that can
| • receive and record a single stream of digital video from an analogue receiver from its input, |
| • send a digital stream out as analogue television from its output, and |
| • download data over a telephone line with a modem. |
What I really like is that anything I can think of that I would do with my TiVo box's resources is something my TiVo box actually does without making me spend twenty minutes groping around mislabeled and confusing menu selections.
Somebody told me there's a genuine Linux computer
with some well-thought-out, well-written, well-supported software
inside my TiVo box.
What I can tell from firsthand experience
is that my TiVo is a joy to use
mainly because the engineering decisions
of what choices to offer
and how to offer those choices
were done seriously well.
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0:42:28 Mountain Standard Time (MST). 10122 visits to this web page. |