Dec

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TiVo Guilt?

December 3, 2008 | 1 Comment | Joshua Gans

CNN asks whether you are afflicted by TiVo guilt.

“You want to watch TV, and what do you have? You turn on your DVR and you have a homework assignment,” says Brad Berens, chief content officer for iMedia Communications, who analyzes how media advances change people’s behavior.

“Economists call this ‘opportunity costs,’ ” explains Berens. “You’re sitting there and you have to weigh, well, ‘I have to watch this thing, because I promised myself when I told TiVo … I want the whole season of that! Go get it! And go get things like it!’ And so you’ve committed to this decision and it’s a burden — suddenly your relaxation has turned into more work.”

Well I am not sure I have guilt but there is stuff not being watched on my DVR. Lots of past Daily Show’s and Colbert Reports but more critically stuff that I mean to watch but never feel like it like that documentary on the disappearance of Harold Holt, a mini-series on John Adams and United Flight 93.

Of course, I make the mistake of relying on a Foxtel IQ2 which sometimes fails to record these shows properly and you don’t find out until half way through them. Of course, at the moment this has just happened to shows record on 10 and 7 HD. Coincidence? A TiVo might be a better bet except that the stuff that I store but don’t watch is all from Foxtel.


Comments

One Response to “TiVo Guilt?”

  1. Endi on December 3rd, 2008 9:45 am

    I think the same applies to RSS feed.

    I’ve been using NewsGator Inbox to fetch feeds from sites and blogs that I have interest in and download it straight into my Outlook.

    Although it never has become to the point that it feels like a chore; I do notice that I lost interests in reading many of the feed contents that have been downloaded.

    I wonder whether this is just simply human nature that we want what we don’t have but once we have it we don’t want it as much anymore.

    ps. a disclaimer, I do subscribe to your blog’s RSS feed, and it still excite me whenever I saw new post become available.