Please Help Me Decide....

I've got TiVo. In fact, I have two, and life has never been the same. It's not even that I watch a ton of TV - it's just that with work, two kids, house stuff, etc., I don't have time to watch TV when the shows are actually on. Or I don't want my kids watching them with me. Plus you can pause and rewind live TV, easily skip through commercials, etc.

TiVo makes it easy to record and store programs, I can share programs between my two boxes, I can share iTunes and iPhoto to the TV/stereo through TiVO, etc. The service is reasonable, at about $12.95 a month.

It's also nice for the kids since I can record some of their programs that they like to watch and play them over and over, which is what kids at 3 years old like.

Also, TiVo will be releasing TiVo To Go in the near future, which will allow you to download programs to your laptop for portable viewing. Nice for me since I travel a lot for work.

All in all, I'd definitely recommend doing the DVR route, with either TiVo or a comparable service. It's fantastic.

I have TiVo, too, and very much like it. The best things about it are being able to record latenight shows such as the Daily Show and then watch them at a reasonable time, as well as being able to record things like football games and skip through the commercials and interminable instant-replay decisions. Also, I have DirectTV, so I'll order pay-per-view movies and watch them on my own time. Never have to pay a rental late fee!

Problems are when a show is bumped to a later time because of a sporting event or some such (this happens OFTEN with The Simpsons) -- your TiVo will dutifully record the time when the show was SUPPOSED to air. Also, the service is not perfect. Sometimes I'll have a subscription to a show and it simply won't be recorded, or it can't tell the difference between a rerun and a first-run show. For example, I'd like it to record SportsCenter every day, but even when I specify to record both reruns and first-runs, it still won't record it. I can get around this through manual recording, but since SportCenter varies its airing times, this isn't perfect either. I'd be interested to know if Replay-TV folks have those problems.

Replay does have the same problems as Tivo in regards to some scheduling issues. I had replay and swithced to Tivo. Tivo's interface, relaying, Mac connectivity and upcoming Tivo-toGo are all huge selling points for me. Most stufies show that people watch more TV when they have DVRs - my wife and I probably fall into this trap - nut at least we're not watching the commercials anymore. Once Tivo integrates itself into your life you can't go back to normal TV.

It's like I always say to my wife as I hit fast forward, "Commericals are for suckers!" Too bad I work in the advertising biz.