I love to watch the Olympics and get quite obsessed about it. I had thought about getting a DVR for some time but just never did it. Well the Olympics as a good reason so I purchased my Tivo a few weeks ago. Then I could watch the games on my own schedule and watch just the parts I want to see. Here are some reasons that Tivo make the Olympics even better.
1) My Tivo HD will record 180 hours of video (I don’t have an HD TV). Many sessions of the games are 5-8 hours long. Try and record that on a VCR! I can easily record every session of the games.
2) I have things to do between 6-9pm and don’t like to watch TV during that time. With the Tivo I can fire it up at 10pm and not miss anything. Don’t have to sluff church (like some of you!) because I can catch up later.
3) It is amazing how much “filler” there is in Olympic coverage! For every hour of coverage there are usually about 20-30 minutes of actual athlete competition. I can easily fast forward though all the junk and just watch the competition. I can easily make it though 5 hours of coverage in 2 hours and still see all the exciting stuff.
4) I admit there are some less than interesting events in the Olympics. Some I can skip completely (like badminton, cycling, rowing, synchronized diving and others). Some are actually more fun to watch at 3x speed. Watch soccer at 3x speed and it is like a pinball game with the little white ball just bouncing all over the place. Tivo has a very smooth 3x fast forward and you can still see all the action. Then just slow it down at the end or during the goals. I am not a huge fan of gymnastics, but on high speed they are much more interesting. And I was able to watch the exciting endings of the men and womens team competitions.
Overall I love my Tivo and will never watch TV the same again. It is amazing that there is actually some good stuff on TV. And when it is waiting for me I find myself watching better quality TV and actually watching less hours per week. I have also loved their online free content. Like I downloaded free guitar lessons from Guitar Sherpa. Plus with YouTube on the Tivo I can tons of other great how-to content. I would love to see us have a genealogy/family history content channel on Tivo. I haven’t tried an Amazon Unbox movie rental. This is the future of TV.
No, no, my friend. Rowing is not a boring sport! Nice short races, just like swimming and track. I do envy your Tivo-ability, by the way. We don’t even have a VCR, so it’s just all olympics all day. And because we are only a few hours ahead of Beijing, pretty much everything is life. The only problem with that is that the competitions last too late into the night, and since I teach early-morning seminary, I don’t get to stay up to see them.