Confessions of a PVR User
After owning a PVR (Personal Video Recorder) for nearly a year, I've had plenty of time to reflect on how my television consumption habits have changed. I knew the PVR would have an impact on my 'relationship' with television; what I didn't know at the outset was how.
For years, friends had told me how getting a PVR will "change your life," which always struck me as giving the device far more credit than it probably deserved. While I can't say my life has been profoundly changed by the addition of this gadget, I have made a number of observations about my life A.P. ("After PVR") that I thought would be worth sharing:
I almost never watch live television anymore. Perhaps if I was into sports I would, however the only time I can recall watching live television in the last few months was the night of the Toronto mayoral election.
I am addicted to the "skip back" feature of the PVR. There have been a number of occasions where I've gone to see a movie in a theatre and found myself reaching for the remote (that wasn't there, of course) to quickly rewind the last 30 seconds of what I just saw. Then it dawns on me that I can't. Then it occurs to me that I don't get out enough!
I have become far more 'open-minded' in my choice of television shows to sample. Since I can store something like 200 hours of programming on my PVR, and it's so easy to program the recorder, I'll happily record a show that sounds interesting. If I don't like it, zap, it's gone in seconds. This ability for people to easily 'sample' new shows is one of the PVR's greatest strengths for content providers.
Since the PVR's remote control has a handy "skip forward" button that skips exactly 30 seconds ahead, commercial "breaks" are no longer breaks and rarely have commercials in them. When the show we are watching fades to black for a commercial break, I press the "skip forward" button six times and we're back into the show.
Yes, this means we watch far fewer TV commercials, however every now and then we get a momentary glimpse of a commercial that so intrigues us that we deliberately "skip back" to watch it in its entirety. The fact that we're consciously choosing to watch certain commercials - to devote our full attention to them - is not something I imagined would happen, however I am sure it's music to the ears of some advertisers. (By the way, it would seem that any commercial that features cute animals will get the "skip back" treatment in my household since my wife is a huge animal lover. Not surprisingly, she's seen every Telus commercial ever made!)
Finally, although my home theatre has become fully digital, my mind has not. I still ask my wife if she "taped" a show using the PVR when, of course, there's no tape or taping involved. Old lingo dies hard, it seems.
