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Is anyone aware of any ongoing Tivo promotion that has ran in the past - ie, the unit and a year of service for $80. My year is running up from the last promotion, don't think it's worth $12.95 a month.

the service used to be 7 bucks, pretty soon it won't be worth the money to get tivo.

$13/month generally blows away cable (assuming a normal set of channels, including history, scifi, discovery, etc). I'm paying $85/month for cable in Manhattan. So what I pay in 2 months I could get Tivo for a year. (which I would do but I'm likely moving soon -- will TiVo after my move)... ....but $80 vs. $150 per year is cheaper still...

ralphk917-- i don't think you quite understand TiVo. TiVo isn't a replacement for cable. it's just for recording shows. you still have to pay for cable/ satellite service (unless you just want over-the-air antenna channels).

The Tivo "service" just seems like a ripoff... first you have to buy the player, then you have to pay them **forever** $13/month on contract (or I think it was about $20/mo without). Maybe worth it if you are completely addicted to television, but at $156-240 per year (nearing $1000.00 in 4 years w/o contract) for what's essentially an electronic TV Guide I have higher priorities.

Tivo is the best-in-class DVR. The time savings to quickly find and record tv is worth the monthly $. Try doing the same with a home-brew dvr (mythtv) and the free guide services (zap2it)... you better enjoy tinkering with such stuff. You can also upload home movies to the unit and share programs
with friends/family that also have tivo. You can program your tivo from a web browser, etc. It is slick. my concern was that advertisers would
put a lot of restrictions on tivo to not skip commercials, etc, but that hasn't come to pass. When it does, I won't be a tivo subscriber.

TiVo is a premium user experience.

I've had it in one form or another for about 7 years now, and I truly love it, but it ain't cheap.

Once you get used to it, it's very difficult to go back to the incredible crap UI being offered by the cable or sat DVRs.

I have an SD unit, and two HD units, and before that I had DirecTivos. Nothing like it, and you have to pay for that.

I am getting a bit disturbed by the amount of branding and advertising, though. Is it REALLY necessary to have the TVGuide logo on the channel banner?