The Web As DVR

Oh how I love my TiVo. And that's not solely because they featured me in one of their customer spotlights (see next posting). No, I like millions of other DVR (digital video recorder) users have changed the face of TV-watching (and TV distribution). I can't tell you how long it's been since I unintentionally watched a commercial. I sat through an hour-long show in just over the 43 minutes of actual content -- freeing up valuable time in which I... watch other shows.

So it came as no big surprise that the networks announced with much fanfare this month their altruistic move to post free streaming episodes online - either on their own website or, in the case of Fox, via iTunes as free downloads. NBC in particular made headlines this Summer when it announced it would be backing out of their iTunes agreement, and are now posting full episodes on their website. CBS and ABC have been doing the same for some time. I know because I watched a full episode of Lost at least a year ago when my TiVo prematurely deleted it.

Well it happened again this week, my Moxi (Motorola's excellent DVR distributed by Adelphia before they were bought by Time Warner) bumping the season premier of "The Office" for two (also excellent) high-def episodes of Ken Burns' "The War."

So I went on NBC and watched it (The Office) and all was good. Except for the commercials. Oh, I'm sorry, you thought the whole point of watching episodes online was to avoid commercials? Not any longer. I suffered through at least five segment breaks in my half-hour program, subjected to the same two DirecTV ads and two cars.com ads during each. And the difference between this experience and using my DVR was that there was no way to fast-forward the ads. All I could do was hit mute on my laptop and roll my eyes. That would have been a good name for this blog (rollmyeyes.blogspot...)

The point here is that, lest we think that we're actually getting a free service by being enabled to stream TV shows online, we're actually being locked into commercial watching. Again. Personally I'd rather pay $1.99 to Steve Jobs et. al. and own the show rather than feel like a pre-TiVo sucker.