As a mobile road warrior that has to travel close to 100,000 miles a year, I don’t get a lot of time to watch television. To be truthful, I don’t find a great deal on TV that interests me, although I am a big fan of the Food Channel, HGTV, the Travel Channel and some of the movie channels.
In the past, when I am on the road and especially on a plane, I rely on a DVD movie played back on my laptop to entertain me during down times. But a new service from Tivo has allowed me to add TV shows to my laptop so that I can play them back when on the road as well.
Tivo-To-Go is a new free service for people who have the Tivo Series 2 machines and have had their systems upgraded with the new Tivo-To-Go software. You have to sign up for it on the Tivo.com site and, in my case, it took about a month before it was downloaded to a specific Tivo in my home office. Tivo is rolling out the software slowly so I believe my one month wait is the norm. However, it is a free service and one that makes my Tivo even more valuable to me. Once the Tivo-To-Go software is on your Tivo, you then need to go to a special site on Tivo.com and download the Tivo client so that it can manage the actual Tivo taped shows and download them onto your PC or laptop.
To do an actual download, you have to have your Tivo and PC connected to your home network. For some unknown reason, Tivo makes you connect to the home network via USB and did not build an Ethernet connection in to it which would have been a lot cheaper and simpler for the user. Instead, I had to go out and buy a USB-Ethernet converter ($29.00) which is just an additional step and added cost.
However, once connected, I found that the user interface was very simple and straight forward and easy to understand and use.
More importantly, it shows me all the programs that are available on the Tivo’s hard drive and a simple check mark next to any available program lets you download it on your PC or laptop very easily.
But, expect the download times to be excruciatingly slow. A normal 30 minute TV show takes 30 minutes to download and on average represents 900 megs of data.
But once it is in the Tivo-To-Go playback menu, it allows you to do everything else you can do on a Tivo including skipping commercials, speeding up to different sections, etc.
I have had some problems with downloads stopping mid stream and have had to restart the application in order for it to proceed, but I can’t tell if it is a software problem or an issue with my laptop or the home network.
The bottom line is that Tivo-to-Go is a very interesting new service from Tivo that is especially good for those of us who have to travel a lot as well as families that have a spare laptop they can use to download kids programs and let the children watch their favorite TV’s shows in the car.
I am not sure how well it will be accepted by the mainstream Tivo users, but it a great tool for anyone who wants to take their TV shows with them when they leave the house.