The Trouble with TiVo

I love our TiVo. It is honestly one of the few pieces of technology that I use on a daily basis that has so completely changed how I watch TV that I can't remember what it was like to try and tape stuff on VHS and worry about taping over something else, running out of tape, setting the machine up correctly, being able to find what was taped on a tape later without labels... okay, I guess I can remember what it was like before TiVo.

Once our warranty was up, The Woman hacked it, added a new hard drive (we can now record up to 140 hours at the highest quality), an ethernet port and figured out how to download shows to our PC from which we can then burn to DVD. Our library of TV shows on DVD is impressive to say the least. My only regret is that we didn't have this a few years ago and missed a couple of shows that haven't made it to DVD yet.

You get the picture - I heart TiVo.

I also am starting to hate TiVo.

Why? Because no one watches TV with any kind of regularity anymore. I can't talk to my friends about this week's Lost or last week's Battlestar Galactica because they are still several episodes back. One of the few joys in my life - geeking out over the latest TV obsession with like-minded people - has been blown to hell because of how goddamn convenient TiVo is.

Watch TV on your own schedule. Fine. Great. You can also never talk about TV again since you don't want to give anything away or your friends would kill you - slowly and with lots of pointy things.

The same kinds of things were bemoaned with the advent of cable TV. Once we all got used to having more than 3 channels to watch, fewer and fewer people watched the same thing and things fractured a little more. Then we went from a 20 or 30 channel field to 70, or 80, now it's hundreds. On top of that, now we can "time shift" our viewing schedule to our own liking.

Is there such a thing as too much convenience, too much personalization?

I don't know, but it sucks that I can't talk about what's in the hatch with the Bastard since he still has last season's final episode to watch before he catches up with this season.

Thanks, TiVo.