Digital Rewind: Replay TV and Tivo

Imag­ine the fol­low­ing sit­u­a­tion: you’re watch­ing your favorite TV series. At a cru­cial point in the story, your phone rings. What do you do? Answer the phone and miss out on the rest of the show or ignore the phone call? How about a third option: pause your TV. This is but one of the fea­tures that both ReplayTV and Tivo offer. Let’s take a closer look at them.

ReplayTV, which was the first of those ser­vices to come to my atten­tion, offers a VCR-type remote con­trol for live TV and cus­tomized tele­vi­sion viewing.

Using their ser­vices, you can cre­ate your own TV chan­nel by choos­ing the TV pro­grams you want to watch from an easy to use pro­gram­ming grid. Soon, they will also add pre­views that will allow you to look at the first few min­utes of a TV show and decide if you want to add it to your per­sonal channel.

Tivo offers all the same fea­ture but also include a thumb up and thumb down but­ton that will allow it to know what kind of pro­gram­ming you enjoy. As a result, it will make rec­om­men­da­tions as to the kind of other pro­grams you might enjoy. While the unit in them­selves may be far from per­fect, they seem to her­ald the death of BROADcasting.

When the ser­vices they offer are built directly into VCRs, record­able DVD dri­ves or cable boxes, every­one will start cre­at­ing their own per­sonal chan­nel and time shift­ing their pro­gram­ming diet. As a result, the long trend of get­ting peo­ple to watch the same pro­gram at the same time may die off, cre­at­ing all kinds of new headaches and oppor­tu­ni­ties for the TV indus­try: headaches because they won’t be able to charge a pre­mium for the Thurs­day evening spot (tra­di­tion­ally one of the busiest nights) and oppor­tu­ni­ties because they will be able to gar­ner audi­ences for cer­tain TV shows around the clock.

In the long run, I believe this could be a new way to watch TV. Def­i­nitely a tech­nol­ogy to watch.