Tracy and I picked up a Series3 Tivo Saturday. I'm not normally given to high-tech gadget lust, but this was a compelling buy. When I was in Phoenix, I went to Fry's with my mom and brother, and they had the new Tivos there. It sure looked nice, but it was too expensive. My mon's been pining for one. She's saddled with the Cox DVRs now, and hates them. But they can record one channel while you're watching another. Well now, here's a Tivo that can do that as well -- and it has all the regular features like wishlists, upcoming episode searchin, season passes and such that the Cox DVR lacks.

After I got back home, I started thinking about it some more. We've had our current Tivo for 4 years, and we got the lifetime subscription on it. I like that I don't have to pay every month, and that $250 lifetime fee would have cost $600 if we were paying monthly. The Tivo only cost $300, so we're fifty bucks into the black. If I could get the same lifetime subscription on the new Tivo, the price goes down if we have it for a few years. (Of course, the older Tivo's price goes farther into the negative cost end of the scale over those same years, but that's beside the point.)

Our Tivo has been making some odd noises; I think a fan is going. And it has a nasty habit of thinking that it's out of space, when there are plenty of yellow-flagged shows to get rid of (Tracy's lost a few episodes of Lost that way). The menus are slow, and the little IR emotters that shine into the cable box's front are constantly getting knocked around. And another nail in the Series2 coffin: Not only did we pay a little extra for an HD-capable TV, we pay extra every month for an HD cable box -- and we never watch HD channels since the Tivo can't record them! That's kind of a waste.

So I'm at Fry's looking at the new box and it seems like a good deal. It has two HD tuners in it, and so all you need to do is get Comcast to come over and bring the decoder cards that slide into the back. Then we can stop paying $18/month for an HD cable box. Being able to record one channel and watch another is a big plus. But the biggest thing is that it occurs to me that if we want to watch an HD program, we just change the channel! There's no more need to find the TV remote, change the source, find the cable box remote, change the channel to an HD one, turn on the stereo, adjust the volume, and settle in... only to have Tivo change the channel halfway through on the other input, since it think it wants to record something for us.

Being able to ditch the cable box and its fee, plus being able to watch a set of channels that we pay extra for is a big plus. I've heard rumors that there might be a Comcast-branded Tivo coming out soon, and that was sort of what I was angling for. But will the interface be the same? Will it have two tuners? What will it cost per month? I'm pretty certain that there won't be any way to transfer the lifetime subscription over to that box. And what if we move to a place that doesn't have Comcast? We've already taken our Tivo to a different cable company, and it's a couple minute's setup to change it over. No way will Comcast let us take the cobranded box with us, even if it would work someplace else. Why pay rent on something when owning something else means that it gets free-er the longer you have it?

So we bought the new Tivo and called it Christmas.

I have it all hooked up, and I'm waiting on the Comcast guy now. It works as is, but only gets the non-digital channels (up to like channel 70 or something). We already got to see the dual-tuner feature in action, too. It's going to come in very handy. We were watching a channel, and had paused a little, so we were into the buffer. I was fiddling with the remote and accidentally changed the channel. Normally, that means the buffer is lost on the old channel and you have to pick it back up in real-time; anything you missed is gone. But this time, I clicked the last channel button, and there was our buffered show. Cool!

Something I like but hadn't thought about before seeing it is that the whole interface is bigger. The channel guide stretches out so that you can see more on the menus. This is because you can set the Tivo such that it will always show stuff at 1080p (ie, 16:9). This means more area for menus. But for normal viewing, it will draw letterbox bars where it needs to. Changing a channel to an HD one means those bars go away and suddenly your watching HD. Flip back to normal TV channels and it's 4:3 with bars again. It's very nice. (And snappy! No more IR emitter lag!)

Another bonus was that it supports HDMI. So I can lose the five AV cables coming out of the old Tivo. I wish my amp had HDMI inputs. Then I could lose another 8 cables. I really like not having that rat's nest back there. Birthday might come early this year...