It's up to the user whether it is a valuable service but 12 million people use the BBC Red Button every week so it is clearly very popular. I agree VM's current implementation of it is quite clunky but I found it very useful all the same, hopefully Tivo's version will be lightning fast. Sky's version is clunky too, I find the Freeview version the best but the features are of course limited.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcintern...ust_servi.html