Practicalmadness

So last Monday Roxio released Toast 8 Titanium, the latest release of the venerable, powerful Mac disc-burning app. There are a few kinda interesting new features — for one, it now keeps a history of all your burns, not unlike Disco’s “Discography” feature — but what made headlines was the announcement that Toast 8 includes the long-awaited Mac version of TiVoToGo, which gives users the ability to download videos stored on TiVo Series2 PVRs.

I’ve been waiting for a Mac version of TiVoToGo for ages, but like many other people I naturally assumed that when it finally arrived it would be included in TiVo’s own Desktop software, not in a third-party app that costs four times what TiVo charges for their Windows client. (TiVo Desktop used to be free, and older versions still are, but they started charging for new releases after they introduced the video-transfer feature.)

This is another one of those situations, like the iPhone, where I can only do so much complaining. It makes some sense to offer TiVoToGo and Toast together, since you would need Toast to burn any of your TiVo recordings to DVD anyway. Even back when TiVoToGo was included in the 100% free TiVo Desktop app for Windows, you had to buy Sonic/Roxio burning software to do anything with the videos, so the argument could be made that to offer TiVoToGo for the Mac outside of this Toast bundle would really only give users the power to clutter their hard drives with massive, encrypted, unplayable video files. And the new Toast includes not only the ability to burn them to a video DVD, but also to unlock and convert them for the video iPod or PSP.

What makes this unpleasant is that, well, I’ve already paid for the videos on my TiVo. I pay a substantial wad of cash to Comcast every month for cable TV, and advertisers have paid even more money to run commercials during the shows I’ve recorded. I also pay $12.95 a month to subscribe to TiVo’s service, and I paid at least a hundred bucks for my TiVo box. Now I’ve paid an additional $100 to Roxio for the privilege of moving these shows to a computer.

And really, what am I getting for that $100? The files that download from the TiVo to my hard drive are recorded at 400 lines of resolution, which is smaller and lower-fidelity than a regular analog video image. My Series2 TiVo has quite possibly the world’s slowest network card (understandable, since originally TiVo’s networking features were intended only for downloading program info from TiVo, not for moving video around the house), so downloading a single 1-hour TV program takes over two hours. I don’t know if the Series2 DT models are any faster, though given that they were released after TiVoToGo was announced I would hope so.

Once the video is fully transferred to my computer, I have two options: either burn it to a DVD or spend another hour converting it to a format the iPod can read. DVD video is 640 × 480 pixels, and TiVo recordings appear to be captured at 400 × 400. Therefore burning a TiVo recording to a DVD involves upconverting it, and I can’t imagine that there’s not a huge loss of picture quality. (And in case you were wondering, yes, TiVo does make a high-def model — the $800 Series3 — but it doesn’t support TiVoToGo transfers of any kind.)

As for iPod transfers, while the video iPods now support videos at full 640 × 480 resolution, TiVo has capped the size of transferred videos to 320 × 240. That’s the same size as the iPod’s screen, so if you’re watching a transferred TiVo show on the iPod itself you’ll have no complaints. However, if I wanted to hook the iPod up to a TV or watch the transferred video on an Apple TV box, my gorgeous HDTV set would be filled with a blurry, pixelated mess. The quality wouldn’t even be as good as last year’s TV downloads from iTunes (which were 320 × 240): a TiVo recording is an analog signal that’s been downconverted in real time to a medium-quality MPEG video, then demuxed and downconverted again to a smaller format. It’s at least two digital generations away from a clean, clear picture.

So this long-awaited feature — for which TiVo and Roxio have seen fit to require customers to pay $100 to buy disc-burning software they may not otherwise need — only gets you a seriously compromised version of the TV recordings you’ve already paid for.

A Modest Proposal

It really makes one think: if you add up the total cost of a year of cable TV (at $70 monthly for Digital Cable), plus the cost of a 12-month TiVo subscription, for me that would come to about $1096. And I realize that I’m making the kind of stupid financial comparison I spent a billion paragraphs destroying in my iPhone post, but bear with me here.

The typical cost of an iTunes season pass is $40, and at peak I watch maybe eight or nine shows, so those season passes would cost me about $360. A four-week Multi-Pass to The Daily Show or The Colbert Report costs $10, so if I wanted to keep myself 100% up-to-date with those shows I’d end up spending about $120 a year. If we wanted to keep everything 100% fair — since both cable and TiVo subscriptions include equipment — we may want to toss in $300 for an Apple TV box.

Altogether, for a not-so-heavy TV watcher like myself to get his TV programming only from iTunes would cost $780, for a $316 annual savings compared to Comcast and TiVo. Obviously your mileage may vary: you can’t channel-surf on iTunes, nor could I sample a new season or show by just TiVoing one episode to see if I like it, as I’m doing with 24 tonight. And while a lot of shows are available on iTunes now, there are still some that aren’t.

On the other hand, while being able to sample a show is convenient, it’s not free — I’m paying for cable and TiVo, to the tune of $85 a month, and if I were to work out exactly how much I’m paying per hour of television I actually watch, I’m not sure that it wouldn’t be the same price or cheaper to just buy episodes a la carte from iTunes.

And to answer the question of why I’m paying $70 a month for digital cable when I don’t watch that much TV, it’s like this: cable companies have lately started to move all but their cheapest, lamest channels to more expensive and profitable digital plans. A couple of years ago, not having digital cable would have meant that I couldn’t watch IFC or Al Gore’s vlog-tastic Current TV. Nowadays, at least here in Chicago, to forego digital would mean going without Battlestar Galactica. Because cable subscribers have no control over which channels they get for their money, if Comcast decides that a channel airing a show I like is only going to be available on their “Plus” tier my only options are to upgrade or stop watching that show.

When you get right down to it, cable is still a pretty good entertainment value: the quality is decent enough, and you get unlimited access to all kinds of programming, some of which doesn’t even suck. And no amount of bitching over the limitations of TiVoToGo will make owning a TiVo any less useful. But if you place a premium on being able to access your videos on a wide range of devices, the cable companies and TiVo are not so much your friends, is all I’m saying.