I’ve had Tivo for a while, but only in the last day or so have I added it to my home network.  By adding my Tivo DVR to the network I’ve opened up a couple of features.  One is that I can add any photos or music from any of the home computers to a shared folder and we (the family) can view/hear them on the TV that our Tivo is hooked up to.  Since the Tivo is hooked up to our big-screen that should be pretty cool.

The other major feature that we can use is that we can go to Tivo’s web site and download a desktop viewer to any computer on the network and then transfer any of the recorded shows currently on the DVR to the computer(s) for viewing.  That’s a really cool feature, especially for a household that regularly hosts arguments about what we’re going to watch at any given time.  What’s not so cool is that when I installed the software on my laptop (no problems with that) and then went to transfer a one-hour show I realized that the file was 2.5 GB and it would take me about three hours to transfer to my computer.  Yikes!

But, I can see some uses even with the large file sizes and excruciating transfer times.  One, I could download a couple of shows to my laptop and watch them on a flight, or during a really boring meeting.  Two, I could burn the show to a DVD if I wanted although it would make more sense to hook a DVD burner directly to the Tivo, which is what I’ll probably do in the future.

Realistically, though, I can’t see chewing up so my disk space for a one or two hour show when I could just rent a few DVDs for a trip.  Now when Tivo and Netflix launch their combined service that might make things more interesting.  I can definitely see downloading a couple of movies from Netflix via Tivo and saving them to my laptop before a road trip.  In the meantime I think the main utility will be looking at family pics on the big screen.  Hopefully you won’t be able to see any of my increasingly common nose hairs.