We have several tuners on our TV, so we can record with the Tivo box and watch live TV using one of the other tuners (we used a splitter to send the cable signal to this other tuner). Of course, if it's a scrambled channel you won't be able to watch it using that method.

We find that we don't have to do this very often. There's very very little that we will consider watching live. We will watch near-live by waiting 20 minutes & then starting playback, but we've used our old VCR once or twice when 2 shows were on that we wanted to watch. This is a very rare occurrence in our house. Last Sunday we recorded Survivor on the Tivo & Desperate Housewives on the VCR. I can't remember the last time we had to do that.

Keep this in mind. Once you get used to having your Tivo time nor channels are an issue. You probably will only watch the news live. Some people even record the news. You'll always have something on TV to watch and you'll never miss your favorite shows again.