DVRs: Recording a wonderful life

Nostalgia tends to make one of my age pine for the "good ol' days," but I want to take a moment to acknowledge that some things are far superior now.  Most particularly, I wish to commend the makers of technology for the Digital Video Recorder (DVR).  I know it's not exactly new (although it's still not commonplace in all households, despite what commercials might have you believe), but it is truly marvelous.

I remember back in the days of my childhood, where if one wanted to watch a TV show one had to make the effort to be in front of the set at the moment it was airing.  Eventually the videocassette recorder (VCR) became viable at a consumer level and one could set it to record on tape a signal that was broadcast on the TV, so that with some effort ahead of time one could later watch a show even if one was not home at the time.  This also could facilitate the scenario where two programs aired simultaneously that one wished to see, so one could record one while watching the other.

Relative to missing the shows altogether this was a vast improvement.  However, it created a new dilemma: having a videocassette ready to record, and then afterward keeping track of what had been recorded and where.  Obviously, if one was starting with a blank tape and one rewound and viewed the recorded program immediately upon getting home or after the other show was done, and that was the only thing one had taped, it was pretty simple.  However, the ability to record for later viewing serves to make one more inclined to want to watch more, which in turn brings on recording more, which tends to lead to situations where one has multiple recorded shows on the same tape, which means that either one keeps meticulous lists of what is on what tape, or one wastes a bunch of time popping in tapes and searching through them to figure out where the desired program was recorded.

So it was either devote the time up front to stay organized, or devote the time later to find the haphazardly recorded show.  Either way, a new task emerged that was not specifically about the watching but regarding being able find what to watch.

As with any linear access technology, if what one wished to see was near the end of the tape and it was set near the beginning, one would have to devote sometimes minutes to just getting it cued up before viewing could begin.  And we won't even digress to the limitations of the videotape itself, with the potential for the tape unspooling out in to the player, where when ejecting the cassette the strands of iron oxide-covered plastic looked like a piece of chewing gum one had stepped in, and where the medium itself deteriorated.  And let's not even go off on how the tracking might need to be adjusted in order to get a reasonably clear picture.

Oh, and to figure out what time something was going to be airing in order to set a recording one had to… check TV Guide or the listings in the newspaper!

Now, with hard drives big and fast enough to take in the massive amount of information in a digital TV signal, we can dispense with external media (the tapes); the system merely writes the data to the drive.  No more trying to remember if there's some available space on a tape.  No more having the tape run out before the end because one underestimated the space left on the tape (or one accidentally recorded at the wrong speed). 

That alone would be an impressive improvement, but that's just the beginning.  Because it's basically a computer, it keeps track of what has been recorded in a convenient list that dynamically updates as shows are added or deleted.  No more handwritten lists of what is where. 

But we're just getting started.  There's no searching through TV listings in a magazine or newspaper; there's a guide that shows what's scheduled to air on all the channels at the various times, so one merely need scroll through the grid of programming to the applicable channel and time, press one button, and schedule the show to record.  No setting the VCR to record at the wrong time or to the wrong channel (or, in some circumstances where it just recorded whatever channel the TV was left on, having someone else change the channel and record the wrong show altogether).  And better still: one can set the system to automatically record the series, so that the next week the show will be recorded without you having to make sure there's a tape in the device, without you having to remember to trigger the recording to occur.

Simple setup, with automatic start and stop (but with options to override if necessary), and dynamic maintenance of what's been recorded:  It's better in all ways.  Surely that's enough, right?

No, the best is functionality that was not even possible with VCRs.  The DVR is not merely ready to record something in the future, it is recording (temporarily) what you are actively watching, so you can pause and rewind the live show.  And if you decide part way through that you would have wanted to record it (perhaps for someone who isn't home yet but may want to see it later) you can tell it to record then and it will include not merely from that point forward but as far back as you watched.

And as the capacity on the hard drives in the DVRs grows, the amount of available space for recording increases as well, reducing the likelihood of running out of space.

The biggest limitation now for many systems, but which with networking will be overcome in the future, is that if one has multiple TVs in the house, one has to record the show on the DVR attached to the TV on which it will be watched.  That was the one thing videotapes had: one could pop them in whatever TV was in the room.

I know this sounds like a sales pitch for TiVo, but I'd say that particular one and its propensity to try and anticipate what you might like based on what you've previously recorded is one of the only downsides to this whole thing.  And that's just because they tried to get too fancy and think for us.  It should know that when we watch TV we aren't inclined toward thinking.

Of course, just as the VCR allowed for recording and therefore increased how much one could watch, the DVR technology has taken that and run with it.

~

I don't know if everyone with a DVR in their home ends up being like us in this respect, but in the several years that we've had one the list of recorded programs has grown past the point where realistically we could watch it all.  When my wife moved out of her apartment she had before we moved in together, the DVR unit she gave back to the cable company had hours of shows that had never been watched, even though they'd been recorded over two years ago.  When the DirecTV guy hooked up the dish and DVR units in both the living room and bedroom a mere six months ago both started out empty; now both have over 50 hours worth of shows and movies.  That's a cumulative 100 hours of viewing material where one or both of us thought at one moment in the past, Hey, that looks like something I'd want to watch, but already we're to the point where if we did nothing over a full weekend but watch recorded stuff (and that means not sleeping) we still couldn't catch up with what we've amassed on a single unit in half of a year.  And it's unlikely that if we were to undertake such a venture that we'd actually enjoy what we'd recorded, regardless of it quality; it would feel like an obligation rather than recreation (much like back in college where when I had to read an assigned book for a class it would not be something I'd enjoy as much as if I had read it just for pleasure).

And this is something for which we pay a reasonable fee each month, at least because we believe we really like TV.

Obviously, one doesn't always find oneself in the same mood for something later; whatever motivation one had when pressing the button to record may have been unique to that moment, never to emerge again.  It's not that it became any less interesting necessarily, and in our minds it holds some association with something we might eventually watch, so it doesn't just get deleted.

However, given that the list of recorded shows is displayed such that the most recently recorded ones are at the top, it does prove to be the case that the farther down we need to scroll in the list the less to find something likely it becomes that something will be viewed.

The more time that passes between the pressing of the Record button and the pressing of the Play button the less the likelihood that Play button will get pressed at all.  And in certain cases the rationale for recording starts to fade from memory (why did we record this Letterman from three months ago?), but the assumption is that there must have been a reason.

And the reason is always:  Because we could.

Although the hard drives in the DVRs get bigger and allow for recording all this stuff, there's still the same number of hours in the day.  However, for some blithely optimistic reason, on an unconscious level we seem to think that somehow there will be.

But maybe it's just us.

~

It is surely an optimistic gesture, this recording of more than our free time realistically allows; it connotes a belief that, somehow, opportunities will present themselves eventually.  A pessimist would not bother, figuring that after a while, when the queue was filled to such a point, it was pointless to keep accumulating material.

Thus, we are optimists.  That must count for something.