According to a News.com story you are no longer allowed to say “Oh I Tivo’d it last night.” You are also not allowed to say “TiVo is the greatest invention of all time.” According to TiVo you are supposed to say “Oh I utilized my TiVo DVR to record that program for later viewing.” or “TiVo DVR is a wonderful appliance.” Yeah, I’m going to follow that about as much as I follow Google’s guidelines on using their name. This is sick. A few years back they had a press release where they wanted people to equate TiVo with DVR to the point that they were paying people to use those words synonymously. Look at Friends and Sex and the City. They didn’t just say that because it was a cool idea, they were paid product placements. Now we have to reverse ourselves. My TiVo DVR is great because the TiVo User Interface makes it easy to watch TV my way. Microsoft is catching up. If you haven’t seen the new Windows XP Media Center 2005 Edition it’s worth a look. Especially since you can get an extender for your X-Box and watch your recorded TV, music, and pictures anywhere in the house. Over the next year I’ll be phasing out the TiVo in my living room and replacing it with a Media Center, and hopefully an X-box in the bedroom. TiVo should be worried about DirecTV dropping them and Comcast going with a Microsoft solution. TiVo has already made a change where advertisers can display an ad as you are fast-forwarding through other ads. Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of fast-forwarding through the ads? On the other hand the TiVo DVR with built in DVD Recorder burns the TiVo Interface on the DVD as the page menu. It sounds great, but I bet it would be a simple exercise to do the same thing on a Media Center PC. Besides that, I actually have the SDK from Microsoft. It’s only a matter of time until you faithful readers start asking me what happened to my beloved TiVo DVR.