With the announcement of a low price “lite” TiVo HD coming any day now, Robyn and I decided to look into the prospect of recording in HD. Right now we have the lowest of low end 40 hour series 2 TiVo, we got it at Christmas time a few years ago, back when, to be honest, we rarely watched TV outside of Lost, Desperate Housewives, Grey’s Anatomy and House. Of course 40 hours isn’t really a lot as thats the lowest recording quality, in high quality it’s more like 20 hours, and even then we never thought we’d record that much…
How very wrong we were…
We recorded everything and anything, game shows, freak shows, dramas, sitcoms… It got so much I turned the PC into a Media Center to record even more, now the TiVo is pretty much dedicated to Robyn’s love of TLC, History Channel and Discovery Channel and the PC is my home of, well, the stuff I watched… A short time after getting TiVo we kicked ourselves at not waiting a little longer for the dual tuner version, you know… To record twice as much at the same time? We were pretty committed to getting the Series 3 when it was first announced, multiple tuners, records HD, what more could you want? Well, the $800 price tag ended that dream. So now the “lite” $300 version is very tempting, but first we needed to find out what we had, what we could get from Time Warner Cable and if it was worth it.
Up stepped Robyn first of all, her call to Time Warner was the classic case of BAD customer service. She asked about how we would go about getting a CableCARD to put in our TV (and eventually TiVo HD) and she kept getting the runaround from the person on the phone pressurising her to get a set-top box, even going as far as saying CableCARDs aren’t available as they are in the cable box. Well, we weren’t standing for that kind of bullshit, don’t they know who I am? So I called up tonight, and having worked in a customer service call centre before, I know how to treat these members of the poor, hungry huddled masses, yearning to breathe free…
Turns out it’s not even worth it, oh we can get CableCARDs as we already knew, and adding the HDTV Basic package to our existing package along with the “rental” fee for the cards would be a whopping $16, but unfortunately, as we live in Huntersville and not Charlotte, this area used to be Adelphia, and right now it’s not under Time Warner control outright so we get the shaft all for the sake of, literally, 10 miles, so we only get 3 HD channels (THREE?!?!), CBS, FOX and Discovery HD. We already get these without having to pay so is it worth $315 to record these channels?