TIVO has saved my life

You'd think that the demigods of the entertainment industry would do everything in their power to encourage me to spend more money and conditioning me with non-stop advertisements. I've recently read that hour-long television shows used to contain 44-46 minutes of programming and now that is reduced to 41-42 minutes because of the added commercials. This means that if I sit through 3 hours of television in a night (which is extremely rare) with no restroom or refreshment breaks, I receive almost 60 full minutes of propoganda about products and services that that pay the bills of the entertainment conglomerates. They want me to watch commercials. I can hardly escape them wherever I go. The same article I referenced informed me that a typical hour-long program is broken up into eight segments. That means commericals occur approximately every 4 minutes and last around 2 minutes. That's a lot of opportunities to poop and visit the fridge. Magazines, radio, and other forms of media are the same way. The entertainment moguls are pushing advertising because it pays the bills.

Enter TIVO.

TIVO is a service that allows you to customize your television watching experience. It's well worth the extra $5 per month. You can read about all the cool things it does but let me tell you how it's rocked my world.

• I watch less TV. Studies show that's a good thing. More TV: bad. Less TV: good. I no longer veg on the couch flipping through channels finding something to kill 30 minutes of time before Law and Order: Criminal Intent comes on. I choose the programs I want to see and enjoy them when I intentionally sit down to watch television.
  
• I watch what I want when I want. No more trying to watch King of Queens when the kids are all hopped on desserts from dinner. I don't have to rush home from worship team rehearsal to catch the next episode of Lost and have my wife fill me in on the details of the first 15 minutes.
• Commercials go bye-bye. Well, not entirely. I watch commericals at 4x the speed so I really don't see any of them. The downfall of this is that I rarely see movie previews and never hear about the new creation at Pizza Hut. I'll live. I already know that Lucky Charms is "magically delicious."
• No more conversations like this: "I thought I taped your scrapbooking show on this VHS tape. Oops, I must have accidentally taped over it with this liver transplant I wanted to watch." In fact, I don't think I've even touched a VHS tape in months. When DirecTV gets their act together, I'll be able to save programs on my computer and burn them to DVD.
  

If you don't have TIVO, look into it. It could change your life like it changed mine. My name is Matt and I watch TV.