Hi Jim

I don't think you have to have a digital cable box for TIVO to work. The coolest things about TIVO are that you can have it record all the episodes of Sesame Street, for example (Season Pass Manager). Or, you can set up a wishlist and have it record every show it can find about big birds. Also, when you are watching live TV, and your TIVO is set to that channel, you can pause the show and it will record while pause is on. Then you can start it back up again and fast forward if you want. Also, you can back it up if you missed something. Stuff like that. But, we mainly use it for the Wishlist feature. We have it get all the shows it can find about scuba, poker, LPGA, snowboarding, snow skiing, etc. The way we solved the Tom Cruise problem was to use "cruise" as a keyword combined with the category "Interests/Travel". However, we will still get the occassional Roseanne episode if Dan has a poker game in the garage, or the Scooby Doo episode called Scuba Doo, or whatever it was.

The Season Pass Manager and WishLists are the best things ever.

Oh, one other thing ... it will also start suggesting shows for you that it thinks you might like... kinda spooky.