Join the Tivolution!

a i l e e n w a t e r s

You've seen the advertisements on TV. A man is trying to watch the game when his wife tries to tell him about her bad day. The dilemma is clear: should he stop and listen to her and miss what could be crucial moments of the game, or should he piss off his wife by ignoring her? And then, to the amazement of the consumer, the husband clicks his remote, pausing live TV to turn and look at his wife and make the appropriate commiserate noises before turning back to the game. It's a pretty confident commercial, poking fun at the values of the projected consumer, secure in the knowledge that everyone is going to want this amazing invention anyway. As Nathaniel Wice, a reviewer for ON magazine writes, "Tivo is the best thing to happen to TV since the remote. Consider yourself warned."

Tivo can record an entire season of your favorite programs with one click of the remote, Tivo can pause or rewind live TV, Tivo is so propitious that it attempts to record programs that you haven't asked it to because it thinks you might like it. (In this regard, Tivo could use a little help. My apartment frequently checks the list to find Lifetime movies and QVC specials on cleaning products recorded for our viewing pleasure.) Tivo isn't perfect (yet)--besides its misplaced obsequiousness, 30 hours has proven to be too small a storage space for me and my four roommates, it has not yet discovered how to forgo commercials during live TV, and it can only record one channel at a time. I have full faith that most of these issues will be resolved as Tivo grows up.

How does it work? Well, there is this very diminutive man, whose name is Mr. Tivo Man, who lives in this little black box and asks us what we like to watch. Tivo actually digitally records to a hard drive and so needs to be plugged into a phone line every once in a while to update its internal TV guide, but half the point is the ease with which it is used, so who cares how it works? The more important point is that Tivo is changing the way Americans watch TV. Until you've experienced Tivo firsthand, it's hard to imagine the frustration of trying to fast forward through commercials only to discover you are watching live TV. It's so much more fun to watch recorded TV, because no time is wasted on shows you don't like. Of course, this means that only extremely well advertised shows will ever catch your attention once you forgo live TV. This means that small budget TV shows will have a worse chance of ever making the Nielsen ratings once middle class homes discover how much they need Tivo. But wait, only when watching someplace without Tivo will you ever see commercials at all. Ah, the helplessness that overcomes you after your hand reaches for that pleasantly chirping remote before you remember that there is no respite from Carrot Top commercials without your friendly Mr. Tivo Man! I have seen my roommates rewind back to the show they just watched in order to be able to fast forward through commercials in live TV. The fast forward phenomenon begs an interesting question: how long will it be before television commercials are defunct? What happens then? How can we find out about great new products like Tivo once Tivo absolves us of the need to watch commercials? Stay tuned, I suppose. It's a brave new world out there; I'm sure the advertisers will come up with some way of getting their message across without us ever having to move from the couch.