Convergence?

I was one of the first generation of kids to spend entirely too much time watching TV. Kids before me spent an hour or so in front of the tube with a choice of 3-4 channels that you tuned into with a knob to get rid of the snow and ghosting. Somewhere before my 7th birthday, the "clicker" became a "remote" and all these cool new technologies started popping up, like VHS and CABLE. Suddenly, there was a LOT to watch, and we sucked it all up, especially my sister. We literally had to pry the remote out of her tiny little hands during her 6-hour marathons so she'd wolf down a little something to eat before returning to "I Love Lucy" or "Little House on the Prairie." She didn't say much back then, and now I know why.

TV can be a comforting experience for me now, just like it was in the past. Knowing that at the end of a long day I can sit on the couch and just be entertained, well, let's just say I'm a happy potato. I guess what I really like is that unlike the rest of the day where you've gotta make constant decisions and deal with complicated trains-of-thought, with the TV, you just make one choice and let the show take over. Auto-piloted bliss.

So I was really excited a few years back when Replay and Tivo came along. Cable and satellite were great because they had such a variety of channels and subjects that I ultimately found something I was interested in. The problem was that clamoring through all the other crap that some tractor repairman in Duleuth found exciting was not fun. Before Tivo, TV had become boring.

Suddenly, the world was different. When I was growing up (I know, I'm having nostalgi-mania today), I never understood why I needed to do certain things. Why did I need to go to camp? Why did I need to brush my hair? Why did I need to clean my room? Now Tivo was saying, "You know, you're right. You don't need to turn the TV on at 6:30 sharp or miss the most important stories on the news, and you don't need to watch commercials either; in fact, why don't you go to bed and I'll do everything for you and you just watch whenever you want and, while you're at it, order out."

Tivo and I were in love. (In fact, Tivo, my wife and I had a bit of a menage-a-trois going, but it was actually healthy for our relationship: Marsha got to watch crappy sitcoms sometimes; and me, Charlie Rose. Sometimes we'd all watch a movie together. I know, hot, huh?

Then HD came along and ruffled things up a little. As I've mentioned previously, the picture quality is so good that any sin-awful show looks fantastic and the next thing you know you're 2 hours into a nature program about Idaho's fly population. (Let's hope my sister never gets HD).

Even with HD, I was still spending a considerable amount of time with standard definition Tivo, especially since I could not shell out $1,000 for the HD Tivo (though I am a daily stop on temptation's way to work) . The problem with our plain-old Tivo was that my wife and I had an earlier version that only had so much room on it. For those of you who don't know, a Tivo (or Comcast DVR or whatever) comes out of the box with a certain number of recordable hours. You program what you want, how many episodes you want to keep, etc. and then any unallocated space is filled up with Tivo's suggestions of what it thinks you may like based on what you've been watching. (That's right, your TV is watching YOU). Anything else is kept for a little while and then whisked away forever.

I would sit down on the couch and look at all the programs I had recorded and some of them would have a dreaded exclamation point next to them, meaning soon-to-be-deleted, a virtual death-row. My peaceful TV-hour was suddenly becoming a little tense.

So I did what any cheap, semi-moderately intelligent, technical misfit who stole my dad's tools when I was a kid and took apart everything in the house and then put it back together with 1 piece missing (oddly, everything still worked) kinda guy -- I bought a bigger hard drive and upgraded the thing.

Unscrewing the case, I felt like James Bond with a ticking bomb.
I kept thinking, "what if I screw this thing up, then where will we be? What if I kill Tivo?" What would happen to me?

But with the top off, you really understand what a Tivo is. It's just a computer, and not a very fancy one at that, and if there's one big thing I know a little about, well then, I guess it would be computers.

I let this minorly-dissapointing revelation pass and 1 hour later I had 200 hours of available space. The world opened up and suddenly I was saving scores of programs. On a busy night, Tivo sometimes suggests up to 80 shows. My wife can watch an entire season of crap whenever she wants. And me, I can keep 20 concerts from Austin City Limits and not worry about them getting erased.

So am I happier? Unfortunately not. Ultimately (as I saw when I opened the box) a Tivo and all it's livingroom brother and sister gadgets are no different than their desktop computer cousins.

When I'm in front of a computer, I'm there mostly because I need to get some work done. But when I'm on the couch, I don't want to work. I don't want to worry. I don't want to feel. I just want to grab the clicker and watch some good TV. Technology, meet entertainment; now sit down and shut-up...Lucy's about to start.