Don's ReplayTV® & TiVo® FAQ

Not really. The largest capacity I'm aware of is 30 hours (TiVo has a 30-hour unit, ReplayTV has a 28-hour unit).
That's only 60 episodes, and you'll be spending about $400 or more to keep those.
Compared to putting the same number of episodes on video tape at SP mode and $2 per tape
(total cost: $30), this isn't very practical for us non-billionaires.

Someday the cost of Hard Drives or some future optical media may make his reasonable, but I don't see it in the near future. Check back in 2003 - the answer may be different then!

What am I really waiting for? A TV show server that let's me PPV or
purchase an unlimited-viewing copy of any TV show ever made.
There have been some really good (IMHO) shows that never show up in
reruns. At some point the technology will of course make it practical to
serve these up for a small profit. Yeah, the owners of the old "Probe" TV
series might not make much money on selling it, but if the cost to market
it is small enough, any profit is better than no profit! Right now, I
believe the cost of duping video tapes, distributing them etc. makes it
impractical to do it for many of the shows. I'm hoping this will change.

Heck, I'd pay a fair amount just to be able to show my kids some of the
shows that old dad used to watch when he was their age! :-)

We keep a few shows on tape for long periods, and will re-watch vintage
episodes during the slow summer months. I know movies are a solution to
the network doldrums, but kids enter the picture. I have three, and more
often than not even finding a 1-Hour time slot to kick back and watch
something is tough. I can't stand watching a movie in half-hour or hour
long chunks spread out over a few days.

In these situations, the ability to pop in an old sitcom is really handy.

One of the things I've started to do with my ReplayTV (and now TiVo) is harvest old
reruns that it was always to much trouble to actually try to set a VCR up for.

"Simon and Simon" is being rerun in the late afternoon. Trying to have a
VCR setup to grab some of those episodes was always too much of a pain - I
might not have a chance to watch one for weeks. Now, it's trivial to have
ReplayTV grab it on the off-chance I'll want to watch it. If I don't, well no
problem, it was literally no wasted effort on my part.

I see this feature being GREAT during the summer when the normal shows are
in repeats.

Q2: How does the image look at the various compression rates?

Both systems use a compression scheme called MPEG-2 to compress the data and minimize how much space on the hard-drive is used to store a show. The greater the compression, the lower the quality. Compression can be expressed as MBPS in this situation, or Mega-Bits Per Second. ReplayTV and TiVo use different names for their different quality levels, so compare by the date rate (x MBPS) rather than the name. In the following table, all times are approximate.

TiVo 30 Hours Advertised	ReplayTV 30 Hours Advertised
Good 2 MBPS 30 Hours	Standard 2 MBPS 30 Hours
Medium 3.3 MBPS 18 Hours	<not implemented>
High 4 MBPS 15 Hours	Medium 4 MBPS 15 Hours
Best 6 MBPS 10 Hours	High 6 MBPS 10 Hours

At 2 MBPS, shows with a lot of motion look fairly bad to me.
This is on a 45" rear-projector connected via the S-Video cable. Compared to the "source", the standard quality looks bad.
You can do a A-B good comparison by setting ReplayTV or TiVo to record a show at standard quality and then flip back and forth between the Tuner and ReplayTV inputs on the television. I actually went one step further and flipped between the VCR input (using the VCR as a tuner, no tape involved) to help make it more fair, as the picture from the internal tuner is always better than the one from the VCR's tuner, at least in my setup.

My only disappointment is that when the quality at both system's lowest quality mode (and the one that all advertised recording times are based on) was stated to be equal to VHS tape, I assumed VHS at SP mode. In my opinion the quality is more like LP mode. Nobody mislead me, I just made an incorrect assumption.

Everyone has different standards for what makes an acceptable picture, and I don't consider myself a video expert by any means, able to watch only perfect images. I watch a lot of broadcast TV, and it all looks pretty bad compared to the output of my LD or DVD player, but I still find it watchable.

About the most objective way I know to put it is:
If you are happy with VHS tape in LP mode, you will probably be happy with both system's lowest quality modes. If you aren't, then the next level up is probably where most of your shows will wind up being recorded.

Even this is not an exact comparison, because VHS looks the same regardless of how much "action" is occurring, whereas MPEG compression degrades as the "action" increases. Depending on what you are watching, it may look fine or may be unacceptable. Some animation in particular can look bad at the "standard" quality - very obvious motion artifacts.

Q3: How do I record all the episodes of a certain show?

For Replay TV, you can record either "theme" shows or you specify a
certain show at an approximate time on a certain channel.

In the first case, if you enter a theme of "Home Improvement" it will
record any show with that as the title and I believe description as well,
regardless of time, day, or channel.

In the second case, all you would get would be the prime-time ones,
assuming that's what you told it to record.

For TiVo, it's similar - you just get a "season pass" to a certain show, and it will
record it whenever an episode airs.

Q4: How do these companies make the money needed to provide the program guides?

(June 1999)

Both appear to be planning on some form of advertiser-based scheme.

ReplayTV

In their manual (paper) as well as in the greeting message from the
president (text on the TV), they say that "eventually" there will be
advertisements in RNS (Replay Network Service) to fund the service and
enable them to keep it free.

The original information only said that the subscription to the program guide service
was free - no monthly charges. Later information started to talk about a
two-tier setup. The "basic" service is free, the "enhanced" will cost.
You can certainly divide up the features such that the free basic service
is almost useless, thus making the "optional" service the only realistic
choice. Will they do it this way? I hope not.

Disclaimer: This is based on my my recollection - I don't have an old copy of their
website laying around to refresh my memory in this regard..

TiVo

TiVo charges a monthly, yearly or lifetime fee to receive their program guide. They also plan to place "target" commercials into the program material at some point.

If all that TiVo does is take the normal commercial time and target those ads, I don't see that I am losing anything. If the ad is more interesting to me by virtue of it being targeted than in my opinion I've actually gained something.

Now, if TiVo actually inserts additional commercials (i.e. the show as aired has 10 minutes of commercials but if I watch it via TiVo it has 12) then I am "losing" something, and would expect the guide to be free or at least cheaper based on this fact.

I'm still unclear as to exactly what TiVo is going to do here, but based on their good reaction to the privacy issue as well as my personal impression from dealing with them I don't expect them to take careful aim at their foot... :-)

General

One of my concerns is to make best use of the limited screen space. Putting an ad in the program guide will use space I want for actual information, so I'm against that scheme unless I have a choice. Plus, talk about a "commercial that cannot be skipped"! If you have an ad in the program guide you are looking at it with no way not to. I guess you could tape a piece of cardboard over that part of the screen... :-)

Q5: How do I find specific TV shows?

For ReplayTV, You can set up a "channel" that will record all shows that
have "Magnum" in them.
It's not clear (at least from the manual) what fields are searched
for this keyword. From their examples, they search the title and the list
of actors, at least.

There is no way to search the program guide to see when/if "Magnum, P.I."
is being shown. With VideoGuide you could not only see groups of shows by
category (as I recall) but you could view an alphabetized list of what was
showing in the next 7 days.

I know they are trying to make this "easy" to use, but it's a mistake IMHO
to accomplish this by leaving out features.

Q6: Why would I buy one of these things when VCR's are so cheap?

One common comment is that a VCR is a lot cheaper than a device of this nature.
One HUGE area for ReplayTV is going to be sports. Do you want to tape the entire
thing and then watch it several hours later? Probably not! Would you like the ability to
perform your own instant replay? Yes! Sometimes the best plays don't get
re-shown and you would like to see them again. Would you like the ability
to pause the game when the pizza delivery person arrives? Yes!

These are things that you essentially cannot do with tape.

Even in the realm of watch-it-the-next-day time shifting I'd pay (and am
actually) to not have to fool with a big pile of tapes and scribbled notes
as to what's on which tape.

Quite often our schedule is such that we arrive home ten minutes into a
show we'd like to see, and it's an hour long, and we don't have a 1:50
slice of time available (which is what it would take to finish taping the
show and then watch it), but we do have an hour.
The ability to to start watching it as it's being recorded is great!

Yeah, you could wait till the 1st half-hour is taped, start a second tape
for the last half-hour in a second VCR and rewind and watch the first
tape, but is this really how you want to spend your
let's-relax-and-unwind-for-an-hour time?

Q7: Does ReplayTV Need To Connect Every Night?

ReplayTV keeps about one week of programming stored, so you don't need to
connect every night as far as I can tell.

Mine has not connected since Saturday night (disconnected the phone line on Sunday),
this is Monday, and I can see program info through next Monday.

I see no way to tell it what time of day to call, but if you go into the "setup"
screen, it will try to call when you are done, so that appears to be a way to
"force" it to call on demand.

Q8: Do they cost the same?

This is not as simple a question as it might seem due to the different ways that ReplayTV and TiVo price their offerings.

ReplayTV does not charge extra for a "lifetime" subscription to their program guide, although at some point it will have advertisements. They plan a premium subscription whose price and features are unknown to me at this time. Also unknown (to me) is if the fee-based premium service will have advertisements or if that will be one of the big differentiators between the plans.

TiVo allows you to subscribe to their guide on a monthly, yearly, or lifetime plan. The monthly fee is $10, annual is $100 (save $20 over monthly), and lifetime is $200 (save quite a lot one would hope!). They also plan to have advertisements, but these will apparently not be in the program guide, but will appear as embedded commercials in the program material. I assume that these can be fast-forwarded over, but this entire plan is still a bit hazy (to me). If they do it right, it I think they can make both the advertisers and the viewers happy. Time will tell.

If you have been stung before my paying up front for something that has "gone away", the month-to-month option is nice. Hopefully both ReplayTV and TiVo will be around for the long-term, but as any former VideoGuide(r) customer will tell you, a great product is no guarantee of business success.

The following chart tries to compare the costs as of 5-Nov-1999, based on each companies prices as displayed on their web sites:

Item	TiVo	ReplayTV
14 Hour Box	$300 - or - $500 if you include lifetime subscription up-front to match ReplayTV	n/a
30 Hour Box	$400 - or - $600 if you include lifetime subscription up-front to match ReplayTV	$500
Extra Remote	$30	?
Upgrade from 14-Hour to 30-Hour	$300	n/a

Q9: How do these units let me skip past the commercials?

ReplayTV has a "30-second skip" button, which is pretty self-explanatory.

TiVo has what they call "Smart Scan", which requires a bit more explanation.
TiVo gives you the choice of three FF speeds, with the highest being very fast indeed. You can skip commercials at a very good clip (*much* faster than my VCR) but obviously at this speed, by the time your eye-brain-finger reacts to the show being "back", you have overshot well past the end of the commercials.
The "smart" aspect is that TiVo knows to "rewind" some amount proportional to the FF speed you were using so you don't miss any of the show. In theory, this can actually get you through commercials faster than the "30-second skip" button, but I have not tried to run tests to verify it. If you skip 30 seconds too far, you now need to rewind etc. so that eats up some time, so I can see where the TiVo scheme might be better.
I'm still forming my personal opinion, but TiVo scheme works better than I had thought it would compared to the 30-second skip.

Update, June 2000: Having used both systems quite a bit, I've concluded they both work pretty well. I use the middle FF speed for TiVo, and in that case ReplayTV is faster at getting past the commercials. You still need to be cautious to not "overshoot" with ReplayTV, but if you are fast on the button and get that 30-second skip going right away, it works well.
If you hate all commercials, ReplayTV is for you. If you want to stop and watch the entertaining ones, TiVo let's you do that.

Q10: What about my privacy? Are my viewing habits being tracked?

Assuming that you will get junk mail (i.e. no way to stop it), which would you rather get: flyers about products related to your hobbies and interests, or stuff that interests you not at all?

Everyone has a different level of tolerance for how much privacy they want to give up, and for what reward. I'd suggest to anyone concerned about their privacy and contemplating purchasing TiVo, ReplayTV or even a satellite dish system to read and understand that companies privacy policy, since all of them have the technology in place to impact your privacy. The question becomes that of their intent and contractual commitment one way or the other.

Since TiVo has stated their intent to gather some data on viewing habits, a lot of people have been upset by this.
Read TiVo's privacy statement. The "loss of privacy" is not really an issue IMHO due to the way TiVo has structured their plan. There is no more loss of privacy than subscribing to a certain magazine (actually less). If you buy all your magazines from the news stand for privacy reasons, than TiVo might concern you, but in that case any device of this type would.

I'm NOT for less privacy, and in fact am more paranoid about that than most of my (non-technical) friends and family. I think that most people will not be that concerned with TiVo's plan once they get past the knee-jerk reaction (it was mine also) and look at the protections to privacy that TiVo has in place. The default level is good, but the option exists to completely opt-out of the data gathering and targeted ads if so desired. This should satisfy all but the folks whose concern extends to not trusting what TiVo has committed to do. At this level of paranoia, ReplayTV is a concern also, since the technology is in place to gather info on your viewing habits with that device as well, if they desired to do so.

I think this is a fascinating result of new technology, and like most advances can be used for good, bad or both. Time will tell!

Q11: What do these boxes do about Macrovision?

TiVo will reproduce the Macrovision encoding IF it was present on the source material. As in, they don't act as a Macrovision remover. They do not ADD Macrovision encoding, you can record programs off of the TiVo unit just fine.

ReplayTV currently does not retain the Macrovision encoding, but I believe that a future software release will. I don't expect that they will ADD Macrovision encoding either.

Q12: How do I expand my PTV device to get more storage space?

(June 1999)

ReplayTV planned originally to sell an external expansion box that connects via the Firewire port. Their latest model, the 2020, does not have a firewire port. The conclusion that can be drawn from this is that there will not be any firewire expansion for these devices. Quite disapointing for purchasers of early models if true. ReplayTV has made no announcements either way, but the removal of the Firewire port is a pretty strong hint...

TiVo can expand their 14-hour unit to 30-hours for $300 by adding another hard drive inside the existing box. Beyond that, no plans are announced. There WILL be larger capacity hard drives available, so the option to replace the existing 13G HD with a 50G HD will probably be available some day.
Pros: No additional space needed beyond the existing box. Probably cheap since no extra hardware (other than the HD) is needed.
Cons: Unlimited expansion is not possible. You will be without your PTV box while it's being sent back to be upgraded.

Q13: How loud are these devices? Do they have fans?

For both units, you can hear the HD clicking and whirring in a very quiet room if they are sitting out in the open. If you put them in a stereo stand with glass doors, they are very quiet. Even sitting out it's not really noticeable when you are watching a show.

TiVo has a fan. The fan is a very small very quiet one - I can't hear it running.
TiVo states that by using a fan, they are able to tighten up the box and minimize the HD noise. I have not tried to do any A-B comparisons to see if this really works or not compared to ReplayTV.

Update, June 2000: TiVo does seem a bit quieter than ReplayTV. If they are in a glass-doored enclosure, you can't hear either of them in normal operation. At 2:00 AM when the house and the world are real quiet, you can hear them, but it has to be quiet.

Q14: I loved VideoGuide®. Which device is the best replacement?

So did I.

If you like a program grid (like VideoGuide had) than ReplayTV's grid is very similar. TiVo uses a system that has some strengths but is different from a "normal grid". It's better for some things, worse for others.

At the moment, ReplayTV has no way to search the program listing by name as you could do with VideoGuide. TiVo does have this capability (which I find essential) and let's you narrow the search by category like VideoGuide.

Neither one is an exact replacement because each has some of the functionality VideoGuide had but not all. Both are as easy to use as VideoGuide and both of them make me miss my VideoGuide a lot less. Now if they just had the news that VideoGuide had...

Q15: Which company will be around a year from now?

At this point, I'd say both of them.
TiVo is backed by Phillips (and is partnered with Sony).
ReplayTV is backed by Panasonic.
Being partnered with large companies who have the deep pockets needed to stay players in this new market is a good thing. The market itself is going to be very strong, I see these devices having a large impact on sales of traditional VCR's (Panasonic's recent deal with ReplayTV says they think so also, and the folks at Sony can see the writing on the wall as well).

I would expect all of the current VCR makers to try to get into this technology as a matter of survival in the VCR-like-device market. There will certainly be more competition for TiVo and ReplayTV in the future, but both companies seem smart enough and fast enough to leverage the lead they currently enjoy and remain viable.

Update, July 1999: TiVo is being sold at some of (all of?) the "Fry's" retail electronic stores. This is a good sign! I expect that ReplayTV will follow suit. In September of 1999, the Best Buy chain of retail stores is carrying the TiVo units. Also in September, TiVo went public and began selling stock in the company.

Update, June 2000: Panasonic is selling their ReplayTV unit, and Sony is selling their TiVo unit. As expected, both companies seem to be in it for the long haul.

Q16: Does TiVo or ReplayTV have any special features for archiving shows to a videotape?

Both devices have S-Video and Composite Video output jacks which can be connected to your VCR. On both units there are two sets of these outputs, so you can have one cable to your TV and one going to your VCR (no cable swapping required).

While recording onto the VCR, you can fast-forward over the commercials if desired. There is no way to "edit" the commercials out at this time, although I'd expect one or both systems to add that feature at some point. Customers want it, but industry pressure might make the companies reluctant to add it (For example, TiVo has NBC as a partner, no telling if that will skew the features that could be made available).

Also at this point, neither system let's you put together a "playlist" of shows for unattended transfer to a VCR. I'd expect to see this feature added in the future also.

Q17: How many days of program information does TiVo store (it's more complex than it sounds)

The best answer to this one comes from TiVo themselves:

The TiVo Service holds 14 days of data.
The TiVo Service is based on GMT Time, and thus a day ends at 4:00 PM Pacific, or 7:00 PM Eastern. TiVo downloads new data at Midnight, and it is ready for distribution at about 8:00 AM Pacific time.
Your box can dial in at any time, and does so about once every 24 hours. -The current day (today) is one of the 14 days. So, in an ideal situation, if today is Tuesday, then your program guide should go through Monday, 13 days from now, and end at 4:00 PM Pacific, or 7:00 PM eastern. If your box last dialed in after 8:00 AM Pacific today, you get to Monday July 5th, but if it dialed in, before 8:00 AM Pacific today, you will only have to Sunday July 4th. If your box dials in after 4:00 PM today, but before 8:00 AM tomorrow, you will still only get program guide data to that Monday the 5th, but the first GMT day it downloads will already be gone, technically. In this case, having dialed in say Wednesday at 7:00 AM, and having program data to Monday July 5th, it might appear to have data for only 12 days, or 11 days forward.

Q18: Since the "live" TV is actually encoded and recorded, how is it's quality?

Very good! Both systems (TiVo and ReplayTV) record "live" TV at their highest quality mode - it's as good as the original feed for all practical purposes.
One caveat - if the show you are watching "live" also happens to be being recorded, the quality will of course be the same as what you have it set up to be recording that show at.

Q19: Can I record two channels at the same time?

No, neither device has that capability.
The device has one tuner, one MPEG encoder and one MPEG decoder. What they CAN do which is very neat is be recording a show while you watch it OR watch a different one that you recorded previously.

Scenario #1: While watching the "Sport's Night" episode you recorded two days ago, you are also recording the episode of "Frasier" currently being broadcast.

Scenario #2: You got home one-half hour after the movie you set up to record started. No problem, you sit down and start watching the movie from the beginning as your PTV device continues to record the rest of it. End result - you get to see the entire movie and didn't have to wait for it to end before you could rewind the tape and begin to view it.

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