Matt expostulated:
Then there is the part of me that thinks, Matt, if you get TiVo, you will spend all your leisure time watching TV and none of it ... improving myself.That's not been my experience. I own a Pace Twin (it's a DVB-T/"Freeview" box) and I figure that I'm just more selective about what I watch. Before I had a PVR, I might plonk down at an odd moment, channel surf, and put up with watching something that I'm not really interested in. Now I have a PVR, if there's nothing good on when I want to watch, I know I have a bunch of unwatched stuff in the box.
The corollary (ooo get him) of this is that I don't rush to the TV when something I want to watch is on. Yeah, well that was true of VCRs too, except the quality was always hateful. The nice thing about the Pace box is that it records the actual MPEG streams, so the picture quality is just as good as off-air.
Yay. As part of my research analyst contract work with