I have owned TiVo for at least three years. When I first bought it, my wife was skeptical. She is more of an avid TV watcher than me, so I figured once she understood the benefits, she would get it.

It didn’t take too long before she started saying things like, “I wish my car radio had TiVo”, so I can rewind NPR. Once she got hooked on the season pass and 30 second skip, it was over. She bought our second TiVo unit on eBay and we’ve been happily time-shifting ever since.

For whatever reason, I never downloaded the TiVo To Go application. Being TiVo, they of-course support MAC OSX and Windows, so I downloaded the Windows version a couple of weeks ago.

Since my TiVo systems plug-in to my home wireless network, the TiVo To Go application easily found the two systems. I thought this was cool, but since I’m at home or work most of the time, I don’t have a great need to transfer recordings to my laptop.

I did think that saving programs to a DVD would be interesting, if only I had a writable DVD drive. Since I’ve eschewed all of my old computers, I left only with my corporate-issued DELL laptop. Due to copyright fears, my company determined that writeable DVDs drives were too risky. So much for sending Arsenal games from Fox Soccer Channel to Borky in the hinterlands of Arkansas [sorry Rob].

But wait! I have to travel to the corporate home office in NY next week. I do have a need to download some shows to my laptop for the 4 hour plane ride and to pass the long, boring evenings in the hotel room.

I noticed that the premium version of the TiVo To Go will transfer recordings to portable devices. I have an audio iPod which I absolutely love, but no video iPod. My always-hangs-when-I-need-it-to-work-faster Palm Treo 700p is on the supported device list. Based on the difficulty I had in transfering digial music to it, no thanks on the video. Let’s just say there’s a reason that iPod and iTunes are dominating the market – simple and painless.

TiVo To Go rules, just like TiVo.

Tagged: DVR, mobile, TiVo, TiVo to Go