I have a friend who somehow hacked his TiVo to disregard the need to rely on the service. He's since stopped using it altogether and now set up a dedicated media center PC with two TV tuner cards installed (capable of recording two programs at the same time) and tons of hard drive space to record on.
Although I will admit the easy-to-use, watch-on-the-fly DVR is nice .. my cousins have it.
