I cancelled my TiVo service today, after more than two years with it. I upgraded to a Panasonic DMR-E80H, which offers more capacity than my old Sony SVR-2000, but the main reason for the upgrade was the fact I have for some time lost any vestigial trust for TiVo (the company). They spam you with advertising in the user interface (one of the items in the PVR main menu is a rotating ad), expropriate a portion of your precious hard drive space for the said spam, track your usage patterns behind your back, and have a nasty habit of disabling features in software releases.

The Panasonic is pretty much a hard-drive VCR with a DVD recorder (well, at least it can automagically determine the time and time zone to avoid the dreaded blinking “00:00”, let’s see how well it copes with Daylight Savings Time). The user interface is not as streamlined as TiVo’s (among other things, it is annoyingly modal and does not have an online program guide or the permament 30-minute buffer that allows TiVo to “pause” live TV), but it is capable of editing recorded programs (i.e. excising advertisements). Its chief redeeming feature is that it is not a networked device, and as such cannot be remotely disabled whenever the manufacturer feels like stooping lower to appease advertisers and copyright pigopolists that seem to matter more than paying customers. It is also unable to send back detailed activity data to be analyzed by advertisers riding roughshod over privacy.