The good of DIRECTV

Earlier this week I wrote about my love/hate relationship with DIRECTV. Actually, mostly my hate relationship. But I promised myself I would return to the topic to discuss the love relationship. So in this blog post, I will concentrate only on what I like about my new DIRECTV setup.

Before I begin, however, I have to stay that my opinion of TiVo being the hands-down best DVR on the market has not changed. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement.

Specifically, here is a short list of features that I now have with DIRECTV that I didn’t have before with TiVO:

• Integrated Caller ID – This is seemingly a ridiculous feature but I really like it. A simple hookup of my home phone line into the DIRECTV receiver and every time someone calls their name and number show up on my television screen.
• Text entry when searching for shows – Both DIRECTV and TiVo present you an on-screen keyboard that you can use to select one letter at a time to type out the name of a show you are searching for. But DIRECTV also gives you the option to use the number keys on your remote control to type the text just like the original way you had to send text messages on a cell phone before full keyboards came about.
• A power button – I know this seems silly but it always drove me nuts that my TiVo DVRs didn’t have a power button. No on/off. Just always on. If you wanted to reboot it you had to physically unplug it. Now I’m not sure if the power button on the DIRECTV receiver actually does anything except turn on and off a little blue light (it still records with the “power” off) but it makes me feel warm and fuzzy and I like it.
• Conflict resolution – DIRECTV does a great job of walking you through programming conflicts (when you have more shows you want to record at once than you have available tuners). Unlike my TiVo, the DIRECTV receiver will offer me the choice of which show, if any, I want to cancel when a recording conflict occurs.
• % free indicator – Due to data compression, two 1-hour shows may not take up the same amount of disk space on a DVR. Because of this my TiVo could never tell you how many hours of recording space I had remaining. DIRECTV solved this by changing hours to percentages and I’m perfect ok with this. 50% remaining? Good enough. I just look at roughly the amount of shows I have recorded and figure I can get about that many more.
• Supress duplicate standard definition channels – With the advent of high definition channels, often receivers can pick up both the standard and high definition flavor of channels. But if you have high definition, there really is no need to view the identical standard definition channel. Technically, both TiVo and DIRECTV can supress the standard definition channels. It’s just a matter of how simple it is. With TiVo you have to manually remove each standard definition channel from your channel list. With DIRECTV you just select the option to suppress all duplicate standard definition channels

I’m sure I’ll be adding a few more to the list over the coming months but I think this is a pretty good start.

By the way, if anyone is interested, DIRECTV does state on their web site that they have renewed their relationship with TiVo and will be coming out with a new high definition DVR running the TiVo software some time in 2010.