Like Marstone said, it probably is just needed to get PyTivo to work. I don't use Python on its own (yet), but Blender uses it, and I can't use Blender without it.
Pythoin only takes 47.7 MB on my HDD, so it has a relatively small footprint on the 250GB partition I have it on - I'll assume since you're Tivo-ing to your PC that you have a decent sized HDD - you probably won't notice that it is there, and except for a brief "everything is running fine" command window that might be there when you run PyTivo, you'll probably forget about it after a while.
Czar "More spilled knowledge," Mohab