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
Yeah, that reminds me of another trick: Turn on closed-captioning and go into the first fast-forward mode. You watch the show 2-3x faster, but the subtitles still appear, barely slow enough to read. I love watching documentaries that way—it feels sorta like the brain-dump machine from The Matrix. :-)