iTivo – How to Take Your TV Shows With You

Like many owners of the Tivo DVR (digital video recorder), I can’t imagine how I lived before the device. Imagine having to watch TV shows when they want or watching all of the commercials without being able to fast forward. I shudder to think of it.

And yet, as a traveler when I get on the road I am immediately faced with that experience. If I stay in a hotel and want to keep up with my favorite shows I have to regress back to last century’s method of watching TV. I can often be found clicking through channels in futile frustration.

I have a new favorite program called iTivo which is helping me address this issue. iTivo let’s me download TV shows from my Tivo and convert them into a dizzying variety of different video formats to watch on my iPhone, laptop, Zune, etc. The program is free but does require a recent model of Tivo (this would not have worked on my old DirecTV Tivo). Setup is fairly simple. You will need to know:

• The ip address of your Tivo which you can get from the network settings
• Your media access key which you can get from logging into your tivo.com account

After you plug these into iTivo you can connect to your Tivo and start downloading and converting shows. There is even an experimental setting to download shows and strip out the commercials. It will take a while to download a show so this does not have the same sort of immediate gratification as a streaming mechanism like a Slingbox. But because it is downloading shows you can put them on a device like an iPhone and watch them when you are not connected to the internet.