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Hi, I'm Alan and I have a problem. I am a TiVo addict. I don't feel complete without that supple, silver remote in my hand. Oh, the shame.
TiVo really has changed the way I watch T.V. I don't record a great number of shows. 24 and Howard Stern mainly. But I am totally dependent on the ability to rewind and fast forward. I am sitting in a hotel in Rhode Island right now. I turned on the T.V. and it came on to a golf telecast on USA Network. Just as I put down my computer bag, this guy hit an amazing shot. I think. I say, "I think" because the announcers were marveling over it while watching it in slow motion. I immediately grabbed the remote and attempted to find the rewind button. My fingers knew before I did that I wasn't going to see that shot.
TiVo is a beautiful thing when watching sports. Having the TiVo has actually made me realize how fragmented most televised sports is. Football has so much wasted time between plays. Baseball obviously has an incredible amount of wasted time between pitches. Golf is certainly easier to watch with the ability to skip the boring commentary between shots. Hockey doesn't need TiVo and I guess soccer doesn't either. I don't watch soccer on TiVo so I don't really know. And I can't stand watching basketball, so I don't really care about that. TiVo makes the sports that I do want to watch much easier. I can see every play that I want to see over and over - not just the plays that the telecast wants to replay for me. And I can freeze frame when there is a particularly close play at first base, a vicious hit on a running back, an amazing wedge onto the 16th green or even a really hot chick in the stands. Did I say "hot chick"? Sorry.
Claudine records two soap operas everyday. That way she can watch the storylines that interest her and fast forward through the crap. It doesn't hurt that one of the women on one of the shows is one of her patients. She's really cute too. Sometimes I can't get past the fact that my wife had her hands on that woman's.... well...never mind.
But even regular T.V. watching has been changed by my sweet, dear TiVo. If I didn't hear something, boom, I just rewind. If I'm watching an old classic movie, I freeze it to marvel at how it was shot. I have been known to rewind certain sections of Who's Line Is It Anyway and cackle madly as I watch the same 45 seconds over and over.
Now my TiVo addiction has crept into other aspects of my life. I have caught myself with my finger poised looking for a rewind button while listening to the radio in my car.
Claudine sometimes works weird hours though and she'd like to watch her recorded shows upstairs in bed. We joke together about getting a second TiVo for upstairs. Ha ha, we laugh. What a crazy idea. That would just be too crazy. No one needs two TiVos. Hah, we laugh because we realize that it is such a crazy idea. And then we stop and look at each other. And we both know inside that we both want another one for upstairs. We're just one impulse shopping trip away from having two TiVos. We're kind of pathetic that way. I'm sure that there are people who would kill for one TiVo and we're talking about getting a second one.
Claudine inadvertently gave me a glimpse into the future of TiVo. Or what I think it should be anyway. She said even if we had a second TiVo upstairs, she still couldn't watch shows that were recorded on the unit downstairs. It made me think. These shows are just recorded on hard disks. The same hard disks that are in your computer right now. There isn't any reason that a TiVo couldn't act like a file server in a network. All your shows would get recorded to a central server hard disk in your house somewhere and you would watch the shows through smaller "client" units connected to your T.V. It made me want to experiment and make a prototype unit. For about an hour. Then I figured that they must be working on it already. So I just sat down and watched some T.V.
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