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Its the digital picture quality. And a big hard drive (the prices have dropped and are still coming down) can hold a LOT more programs than any analog VCR tape can. The longest VCR record time at extended play mode is 10 hours. By contrast, a DVR can record up to 200 hours of programming. Think of going on vacation and NEVER having to miss a single show again. That's what's making devices like TiVOs so popular.

You have to use it to know. But once you cross over, you never go back.

You can digitally fast forward a whole show and see what you think. You get a whole new perspective on how shows are put together.

And if you like how to shows, you can save them and re-run at will. Yes you can use tape, but it is not indexed, and has no name/description while in the recorder. The indexing alone makes them worth the money. The time shifting and ease of finding what you recorded makes it a slam dunk. Pausing and re-winding live TV is really useful.

And best of all it pus you back in charge of what you watch when.

I now have 4 DTV-Tivos. Bet Rush has 55. I paid $100 each.

tarpon

"Aside from the obvious savings of the cost of tapes, why would one of these boxes be any better?"

It's incomparably better. For one thing, the TiVo lets you watch one show while recording another; you can even record two shows at the same time while watching one from the hard drive. So it's really more like two or three VCRs, not just one. But it also lets you pause, rewind and fast-forward a show while recording that very same show, something VCRs can't do no matter how many of them you have.

Here, for example, is how I watch football (which is the only Big Four network programming I watch). I have NFL Sunday Ticket, so I get about 13 games to choose from. I'll pick the two most promising ones and tune the TiVo to them. Whenever a commercial break comes up on one of them, I hit pause and flip to the other game. When that game hits a break, I pause it and flip back to the first. I never see any commercials, and I never have to sit through the sports droids' chatter during injury time-outs and official review. Plus, I have my own instant replay, so I can rewind to see great plays that the broadcast crew doesn't consider interesting.

They can have my TiVo when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers. If they think it's stealing, then they can do what NFL and HBO do and charge me a subscription. But they're not going to do that, of course, because then they'd find out just how many people don't watch their sludge.