Watching a Child Who's Grown Up With TiVo Leads to Questions About the Future of TV

O Pioneers!
Watching a Child Who's Grown Up With TiVo Leads to Questions About the Future of TV
December 12, 2005

My three-year-old is confused about TV.
It's not so much that Joshua's puzzled by the technology, though he does have an endearing habit of calling it "TVV." His confusion is that our house contains a smart TV and a stupid TV.
The stupid TV is downstairs in his parents' bedroom, and he watches it between the rather early hour at which he wakes up and the somewhat later one at which his decrepit father drags himself out of bed. The downstairs TV looks like the upstairs TV, except the shows on it are only on at set times, you can't see old shows whenever you want, and if you have to go to the potty you miss things.

The smart TV is upstairs in the living room, and it doesn't have any of these disadvantages. Because -- as you've probably guessed by now -- it has TiVo.

There are plenty of testimonials to the transformative power of TiVo and its digital-video-recorder rivals, and while they're all true, I'm more interested in my son's experience. We got TiVo the week he was born, so Joshua has never known a world without it. (By the way, I highly recommend TiVo as a gift for first-time parents whose schedules were just blown to smithereens.) The issue isn't whether Joshua watches more TV or less -- TiVo is how he watches TV, period. Unless he's stuck with the downstairs TV, in which case he's baffled to hear that no, he can't watch "Maisy" anytime he likes (for the unintiated, Maisy is an amiable, vaguely British mouse), or "see that part again," or skip over "the part for grown-ups," which is what he calls boring ads and PBS pledge drives.


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