Shortcuts / Speed of Use

Tivo's been around for years and has incorporated many customizations and handy shortcuts. Some of my favorites are the number shortcuts from the Tivo Central menu: pressing various numbers on the keypad instantly takes you to certain screens (like 2 takes you to your To Do list). This is much faster than burrowing through menus to get to the screen you need.

DirecTV has very few shortcuts, if any. The only one I could find is that if you are playing video you can press the Left Arrow to bring up the last screen you were at (such as To Do, Search, etc.). That's handy.

There are some menu-based features, and though I don't know if I'd quite call them shortcuts, they are timesavers. For instance, when playing video, pressing the Yellow button brings up a menu which includes a "Previous Channels" option: it shows you the last five or so channels you've been to and what's currently airing on those channels, which is nice.

But Tivo's definitely faster to operate: everything's smoother and quicker, though I wouldn't call the DTV HDDVR particularly sluggish. Its performance is generally satisfactory.

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