Let’s face it, there are only so many hours in the day you can actually watch TV. I consider myself a huge TV nut and certainly do my best to boost up the national average, but even with my voracious appetite for film, I still can’t keep up with everything that is being produced right now, let alone all the good films that have been made in the past.
Add to this distractions from the internet, real life, my poker habit, and this little thing called work that I’ve actually got to do once in a while, and it’s clear that something has to give. Because we’re limited by time, consumers are forced to choose between not just what we watch, but how we watch it as well.
In a great post highlighting the smackdown between DVDs and DVRs in competing for our attention, The One Eyed Man Rules, covers the various reasons behind why the DVR has replaced the DVD in his life. Among the advantages are the problems that come up when his kids use DVDs as frisbees, the speed at which it takes for you to boot up a DVD compared to the ease of hitting a button on a DVR and having your programming right there, and being forced to watch a bunch of crappy Disney ads vs. being able to fast forward past ads on a DVR.
PVR Wire agrees with most of the points that are brought up, but does point out that on the plus side, DVDs typically come out sooner then when you can get them on TV and that when you watch DVDs, you don’t suffer from the storage anxiety that you face with a DVR.
Ever since I picked up my TiVo series 3, I’ve been going back and forth on which format I prefer the most. Because I hacked into my S3 with a 750GB Weaknees upgrade kit, I now have 1,000 hours of standard recording capacity and 100 hours of HDTV capacity.
This has turned out to be far too much hard drive space then what’s good for me and with TiVo knowing my secret weakness for Officer Frank “Ponch” Poncherello from the show CHiPs, it keeps me very busy trying to keep up on all the great TV. No wonder Officer John Baker never got any of the chicks with Officer Ponch always hanging around in those tight leather motorcycle pants.
With so much great content on my TiVo, I’ve been really tempted to give up the Netflix subscription because it’s hard enough for me to spend 20 minutes on a sitcom, let alone devote 2 hours to a movie.
The biggest advantage that I see to DVDs though, and perhaps what’s kept me from canceling my subscription to Netflix, is the ability to watch serialized TV episodes in chronological order.
TiVo does a great job with this, but only if you catch a brand new show from the beginning. If you happen to miss an episode, then you either face the choice of jumping in midstream or trying to catch the show in out of order reruns. With all of the shows broadcasting at prime time, even with two tuners, I can’t always follow every program, so if I miss something, I just stop watching it and then add it to my Netflix queue instead.
By watching whole seasons in quick blocks, it actually makes the program more enjoyable for me. It’s like binging without the calories or guilt. If the studios ever got their act together and created an everything on demand service, it’d probably kill the DVD for me, but as long as DVDs maintain their superior selection over what’s shown on TV, then I’ll plan on keeping my Netflix subscription for these DVD marathon sessions.
Davis Freeberg is a technology enthusiast living in the Bay Area. He enjoys writing about movies, music & and the impact that digital technology is having on traditional media. You can read more of his coverage on technology at www.davisfreeberg.com. Davis owns shares of Netflix and TiVo stock.