Video On Demand: Cable Companies Make Watching TV a Chore
Posted on 03 December 2008 by Lisa Pawlowski
My cable company sent me a notice in the mail last month letting me know that Video-On-Demand is coming. Now I can look forward to not having to fight traffic and waste gas driving to a video store only to find that the movie I wanted to see isn’t there. A friend of mine swore that once we get VOD, we will think it is the absolute best invention ever.
But there is a down side to progress. The cable company is letting its customers set their own time for switching over because once they do, everything on their DVR list will be deleted. If people don’t do anything, the TV Masters-That-Be will do it for them on a certain date they chose.
So what’s the problem? My family and I have movies and TV shows on our DVR we’ve been meaning to watch for months. Some have been on there a year. And now we have to watch everything before it’s too late. Talk about pressure.
All the movies are those that sound good, but I have to be in the right mood to watch them. Most of them are lofty, usually long, and arty. Some I would feel guilty about not watching. I want to be hip to the pop-culture references that spawned from them ages ago when they first came out.
I’m not the only one feeling the heat. One look at our list will tell you that my 13-year-old daughter runs the DVR with all the episodes of “Zach & Cody,” “Zach & Cody on Deck,” “iCarly,” “Drake & Josh,” and “The Wizards of Waverly Place” that remain to be watched.
I know what will end up happening. I’m going to make my choice by not making a choice. I won’t make the call and then I’ll come home one day and discover my DVR list is clean, as if by magic, and I will feel a sense of freedom because I won’t have any assignment hanging over my head. And then sometime months down the road, I’ll look on the guide and say to myself, “Oh, look. There Will Be Blood is on. I always wanted to see that.” And I’ll press the record button.
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December 3rd, 2008 at 8:21 am
I love my TiVo. For about a month, my wife and I had to go with the Cable Company’s DVR. We hated it. It didn’t always work, and it didn’t function as intuitively as our TiVo did. So we upgraded to a TiVo HD, and have since added a 500GB external hard drive. The one drawback, to the TiVo vs. Cable DVR is that we don’t get VOD, but that’s what the DVR is for in the first place: Watching stuff when we want to watch it. The TiVo does have streaming movies via Amazon, though, so that’s kinda VOD.
December 3rd, 2008 at 10:12 am
I can’t complain about our cable company DVR. It’s been reliable. Isn’t the whole Tivo/DVR thing great? It was one of those things I fought against and told my husband it was an unnecessary expense but now I can’t imagine not having one.
December 7th, 2008 at 10:02 pm
We’ve had a TiVo for over 2 years now. Before getting it, we never saw a need for it. After getting it, we can’t understand how we ever lived without it.