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PVR, The (Intermediate?) Future of TV!

I’ve had a PVR with built-in hard-disk for ½ a year now. We have never watched a lot of TV, nevertheless it has transformed the way we use our TV. I wouldn’t want to watch TV without a PVR anymore (but I still think it is only a temporary evolutionary step and I’ll get to that in another post). The 2 features that have brought this change about are:

EPG (Electronic Program Guide): The ability to see what is coming (with a short description), when and where directly on the TV and to be able to navigate in the list is brilliant.

Time-shifting, the ability to watch TV at another time than the original broadcast is THE reason to get a PVR. The EPG is what makes time-shifting practical. Granted, a VHS video recorder and a blank tape can also do time-shifting, but despite working with IT at a technical level I have always had to get the manual out when programming my VHS video recorder. With the PVR I bring up the EPG (Electronic Program Guide) on the screen, select the program or film I want to record and press the record button and that’s it, the programming of what I want recorded is done. Even my wife can do it (Not meant to be disparaging, in fact she has more education than I do, but she never programmed the VHS). Worst of all, I could never find a blank tape when I needed it. 99% of what I have ever recorded wasn’t recorded because I wanted to keep it; I just wanted to be able to see it at a more convenient time. So saving a recording on a hard-disk for later viewing and then deleting it is fine.

The simplicity of time-shifting with a hard-disk based PVR means that we hardly ever watch anything not time-shifted, and even then we have the option of pausing the viewing or rewinding because we missed something and then continuing the viewing. This has become slightly problematic. The device I bought has an 80GB hard-disk which the manufacturer claims can hold 40 hours of recorded TV. We recently “lost” some recordings (the PVR ran out of space and left a 30 minutes recording of something which lasted 2 hours) because of lack of space. The lessons are:

• Effortless time-shifting changes the way TV is watched (I’m not the first one to find out as can be seen here and here).
• You can never have too much hard-disk space (I learnt this lesson back in 1986 when I told a colleague that he was ridiculous buying a 20MB hard-disk, occasionally I need my memory jogged).

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