The World Competes

Update: to find out tips on recording the Olympics with your Tivo, please see my article on 2010 Tivo Olympic Tips.

As an Olympics fan, I like to catch as much of the Olympics as I can. Unfortunately, real life intrudes, and I sometimes can’t be at the television at the same time as it is airing. Fortunately, as of the 2006 Torino Olympics, I don’t have to worry about that.

We got our Tivo in early 2006. The main reason that I can remember that is that I had a dinner to go to on the night of the opening ceremonies. I Tivo’ed the Opening Ceremonies, and many other events that year, and was able to see just about as much of the Olympics that I wanted.

One of the things that I like best about Tivo’ing the Olympics is that I can skip through the commercials. Now, some of the commercials are pretty cool, but how many times do you have to watch them? Also, you can fast-forward through events that aren’t your favorites; NBC likes to combine several differend events in one four-hour block. I personally am not as big of a fan of the team sports, so I tend to fast-forward through a lot of them.

I bought my Tivo with a lifetime subscription, which is nice, because I don’t have to worry about monthly fees. It was quite a bit to pay for up front, but we still have our first Tivo, four years later, and our initial $300 subscription fee has averaged $6.25 per month, if we stopped using our Tivo today (it’s still working fine, although we have talked about upgrading to a Tivo with more storage).

Unfortunately, the new HD Tivos don’t work with satellite. I’m not sure why, but I have tried the DirecTV DVR, and it pales in comparison to Tivo. In fact, when we owned the DirecTV DVR, we had a Tivo at the same time, and we almost never used it. The only time we used it was if we had to record two different shows that were on at the same time.

It’s not too late to get a Tivo for the Olympics; I won’t even be able to start telling Tivo to start recording the Olympics until 3 or so days from now. If you can’t actually make it to the games, I would recommend getting a Tivo (if you don’t already have one) so that you don’t miss a minute.

Another feature that helps to watch the Olympics is the Tivo Desktop. My Tivo is really old and only has 40 hours of storage space; during the Olympics, I often have to shuffle some of the Olympic videos off to my computer hard drive in order to make more room on my Tivo. Tivo Desktop is free, although there is a Desktop Plus model that you can buy that allows you to transfer the recordings to your iPod or other mobile device.