Letters to the Editor: In an era of endless TV choices, a tribute to TiVo’s ‘ease and simplicity’

To the editor: There’s a growing trend of companies making products less user-friendly while “improving” them technically. Usually, this is an attempt to squeeze out more profit.

The promise of streaming’s “everything, everywhere, all at once” approach was to make DVRs unnecessary. But with the vast amount of content now out there, curation is essential to avoid being overwhelmed. To date, no streaming box or smart TV — or app such as YouTube TV — has come close to the simplicity and ease of use of TiVo’s interface (“Say farewell to the TiVo box, the device that revolutionized how we watch television,” Oct. 9). And TiVo’s peanut-shaped remote continues to put all others to shame ergonomically.

Columnist Michael Hiltzik’s statement that “DVRs aren’t needed for streaming services” ignores the best feature of TiVo: fast-forward and reverse on live television recordings. Without that, watching football, with its constant commercial and timeout interruptions, is a misery for me.

I have been told that this is possible with some streamers, but when I tried, I found it clunky, unreliable and basically unusable. TiVo just works. And of course, skipping commercials is a snap with its triple fast-forward — sorry, CNN and its advertisers. Kudos to Spectrum for keeping our machines going.

Robert Huber, Yorba Linda