We can't help but stand in awe of those clever people who have given us those things that we
can't live without. I think Edison may have started the whole thing. Try to imagine your life without electricity or light bulbs. Then came radios, telphones, television, and cell phones.
But the greatest invention of all was the magical TIVO. I confess that Jan and my principal entertainment in the evening is television. It is largely junk, punctuated by frequent and annoying adds. However, there are occasionally some good things to watch which, due to our active social life we might miss. Not any more. Our incredible TIVO records it and we watch at our convienience. Better still, we rush through the commercials and are able to watchthe typical one hour programs in 40 minutes. How cool is that ? It turns out that, in the unlikely event that there are two programs at the same time, we can watch one on regular TV while the other is recorded to be watched later. We even have the possibility of watching a third program on our old VCR machine to be viewed once again, at our leisure.
Almost to good to be true. There is a potential downside. If everyone has a TIVO ( and lots of us do) then the advertisers will no longer have any reason to finance the programs and the quality of TV, bad though it is, will get even lousier. Off hand, I can't think of a solution to this potential problem and must leave it to the industry to solve it. Any suggestions?
2 comments:
Aparently, advertisers have wisened up to your TIVO. The new trend in advertising is to place products within your favorite programs, making sure you notice brand names, and that your favoirite actor is drinking Pepsi, and drives a Volvo.
Perhaps the massive flux of TIVO users will eventually drive down the cost of television advertising to the point where companies can afford to purchase even larger time slots for their ads.(which of course will obviously have to be shot in super slow motion to compensate for the anticipated typical fast forwarding TIVO function, thus resulting in a normal appearing commercial and increased profits! YAY)
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