Still Loving my Tivo... Especially with iTivo

You can rave all you want over the DVR that your cable company rents to you, but for my money I'd much rather have a Tivo. Not all DVR's are created equal and Tivo, IMO, is the best of the best. There are lots of reasons for this, but let me give you one quick example of how Tivo can make your life easier and even help educate my dental office staff. Oh, and this is a great tech story to boot!

It seems that Wednesday morning, my preferred social network tracking program, Tweetdeck, popped up with a Tweet from someone I follow. The tweet was from the folks at Trimara. They make a nice oral cancer screening device that has been on the market about 16 months. The tweet stated that their product, the Identafi 3000 Ultra, would be featured on Dr. Oz that afternoon.

Obviously, this is a big deal. We need more publicity about the ravages of oral cancer. Increasing public awareness is a great first step. More of these terrible cancers would be detected if more people visited the dentist on a regular basis. However, the other reason this caught my eye is because I own an Identafi 3000 Ultra and use it regularly. I anticipated that patients would see the segment and have questions since they know I'm a cutting edge guy.

The problem was, how to see the episode so that the whole team is prepared to answer questions. We needed to see the show to be as prepared and informed as possible.

This is where Tivo comes in. I went to the Tivo website and logged in. Once into my personal Tivo account, I sent a message to my Tivo telling it to record that day's Dr. Oz show. My Tivo is connected to my home network and the Internet via a USB Wifi adapter and within 30 minutes I received an email from my Tivo saying it had received my record request and that it would record the Dr. Oz show. Sweet!

OK, so now I have the show, but how can I get the staff to see it? There is more than one way to do that, but I chose one of the simplest methods. There is a free program called iTivo that is written for the Mac. The iTivo program is a free download and allows my Mac to access my Tivo over my home network. Once I'm logged into the Tivo, I can download the shows which are converted to mpeg4 video which can be played on any computer and lots of media players like iPods. So the program was downloaded, put on a jump drive, and will be shown to the staff tomorrow morning at or organizational meeting that we have daily to make sure our day runs like a well oiled machine.

Just one more example of staying on the cutting edge by good use of technology. To put it bluntly, Tivo Rocks!