Page 532 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

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antenna and digitally record the content to a hard drive. A TiVo is always re-
cording the signal it receives, buffering 30 minutes of programming to allow
viewers to pause live television, rewind live material, or record an entire pro-
gram even while partway through. With a VCR, you must actively choose to
timeshift, going through the often fraught process of programming your ma-
chine to record a program, and then later using the VCR to play it back. With a
DVR, you are always in the timeshifting mode, as it is actively standing by, ready
to timeshift. If timeshifting is an exceptional practice for a VCR, it is the norm
with TiVo—our default mode of using a DVR is to reject the schedule-driven
framework that traditionally structures the experience of watching television,
replacing it with an on-demand viewer-controlled mode of viewing.
Once most DVR users get the hang of its fairly simple user interface, which
mimics a standard computer menu system, watching live TV becomes a last
resort. While the typical television viewer of the twentieth century used the
schedule to shape and determine what and how to watch, TiVo takes the sched-
ule offline, enabling viewers to turn the various options within the television
schedule into a menu of potential files to be downloaded into one’s own personal
collection of programming. This menu-driven mode of viewing is heightened
by a DVR’s electronic program guide (EPG), an interactive grid of the television
schedule providing future television programs, episode titles, and descriptions,
all to be recorded at the push of a button, a development that has also helped
lead to the declining relevance of TV Guide.

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DVRs discourage modes of viewing more typical of conventional television—
channel surfing is rare, as the EPG provides a quick assortment of identifiable
options if the menu of recorded programs doesn’t hold any appealing options.
TiVo users need not arrange their own schedules to view a program, as it re-
schedules any “appointment television” and overrides scheduling strategies like
hammocks and lead-ins. With a DVR, television rarely is “just on,” as anything
deemed worth recording deserves more attention than background viewing.
And the feeling that “nothing is on” becomes nearly extinct—a well-maintained
DVR always has worthwhile options on tap customized for the viewer’s tastes.
These ways in which we have traditionally watched television, both technologi-
cally and culturally, disappear as the DVR interface becomes the default mode of
engaging with television. This becomes particularly significant as many aspects
discouraged by TiVo, like indiscriminate audiences, aimless surfing, and back-
ground viewing when nothing’s on, are facets of television that have been nega-
tively linked to condemn the medium. Critics often characterize watching media
like television as an inherently passive “lean-back” practice when compared with
more interactive and engaging “lean-forward” media like computers—DVRs
make television viewing more like using computers, getting presumably passive
viewers to lean forward and engage actively in their own viewing practices.
The rise of the DVR has transformed the ways that the industry operates—
even though DVRs are by no means as widespread as other technologies like