Intentional Time Shifting

Published by in random on September 22nd, 2005

I hardly watch any TV at all. This is probably part of the reason why my continued home lobbying efforts to purchase a TiVo have met with both surprise and resistance.

Because of the hurricane Rita coverage, I spent some time this evening flipping through channels. Good grief, there is so much trash on regular TV it is amazing. And the ads! Yuk! When you are accustomed (as I am) to listening to iPod music, commercial-free radio, watching DVDs and surfing the web for multimedia content consumption– watching network TV with all the ads seems like an outrageous affront.

I love RSS in large part because it lets me skip the ads. That is a reason to want a TiVo / DVR system as well. I had a recent discussion about this with my in-laws. I think about the only things people should watch “live” on TV are news (in moderation) and sporting events. Everything else should be recorded on a TiVo or other DVR and viewed as time-shifted content.

Why? Because that can substantially increase the chances that what you are watching is something worthwhile, since it is something you have recorded previously by choice. Otherwise, you are mainly hoping to get lucky in your channel surfing.

Rather than hoping to be lucky with our TV watching, I think people should be intentional in their time-shifting. I am not there yet, but some day I will be. For now, I’ve just turned off the tube.

On this day..

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