Great. Since the Apple/Microsoft war seems to be dieing down, lets get a DirectTV/Dish Network battle started…….

or a tivo vs. mythtv battle.

I think that their headline is slightly misleading. It WILL continue to skip advertisers, but will pop something up on the screen for the moments during which you are FFwding, if I'm not mistaken. It's funny that it's getting newsworthy now, as this was discussed in March of this year, when it's really close to actually happening. Needless to say, you'll still be skipping, but they're going to have things like they do on the TiVo menu come up on screen. It's not as if you're going to have to sit there the full two minutes through the ads.

That said, it might be high time to set up the :30 skip on your box.

On a more serious note, it could actually become ILLEGAL to skip through the commercials.

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,65704,00.html

This article was linked under the “How Republicans can Punish Hollywood” post here yesterday. But the commercial skipping part didn’t sink in with me until I just went back and re-read it today.

I love Tivo, I've had it a few years and when I was without it for a couple weeks when I moved this summer, I was surprised how much I missed it. ("You mean I actually have to be around at the right time to watch shows I want to see?? WTF is this BS!??") I could not stand watching TV without it.

Tivo also needs a high-def recording option. I have the new HLP6163W 61" Samsung DLP hi-def TV, but if I want to see a television signal in hi-def I have to bypass Tivo and watch TV the horribly primitive pre-Tivo way. (I highly recommend the Samsung btw).

It sounds like you'll still be able to fast-forward, you'll just get a pop-up while you do it. Could be rough waters ahead for DirecTV customers though. Everyone wants to make their own DVR nowadays. Even the cable companies are doing it. But at worst, you'll have a different DVR. Bad, but not nearly as bad as doing without entirely.

Nice Simpsons reference.

Dave: I have a 50" Sammy (DLP rocks) and the hi-def DirecTiVo. It has dual HD DirecTV tuners *and* dual HD off-the-air tuners. It's possibly my favorite gadget ever :)

Oh, hey, speaking of tech stuff, the Autorantic Virtual Moonbat just got 607 percent funnier, 'cuz now it's a live chat! Go ahead, talk to the robot moonbat. I doubt it will learn anything, but we've got to try, dangit.

Did you folks ever help that guy fix his 8-track on the other thread? Just curious.

Question...our downstairs tivo has not been able to "phone in" since we have some kind of occasional phone problem w/ our wire. (We now do our "pay per view" on the upstairs tuner as a result.) Is it possible that we can avoid these new pop-up ads if our tivo can't get the downloaded software? Will we experience other difficulties? Thanks!

I'll tell you that yes. It is likely that DirectTV will drop Tivo and probably use something like BSkyB's Sky+ system since it is made by a News Corp. company. It's very cool technology and much more feature rich then Tivo.

Fab. Thanks for the response, and I look forward to hearing about other theories on work-arounds or better technology.

I ditched Directv over a year ago when there was a serious overbilling problem that lasted for four months. Now have Dish and once we got used to it, like it so much better and they do have dual tuner dvrs.

Also as per the mythtv comment I built my own pvr two years ago and still going strong. Use it to watch Dish or Canadian satellite on my PC or any tv in the home. Record programs all the time on it for later viewing or transfer them to my laptop to watch anything on the road. Even have a modded xbox to transfer and watch movies that were recorded. Load that up with kids stuff and plug it into the entertainment system in our minivan and voila quiet kids for a long road trip vacation.