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The revolution will not be easily televised

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DAVID SILVA

I’ve been having a lot of trouble with my TV lately. Ordinarily, this

wouldn’t be such a big deal. Your TV breaks, you get it fixed. The

problem, however, is that the experts are telling me there’s

absolutely nothing wrong with my television. I consider this, and

consider the fact that the TV just isn’t working as it should, and

I’m starting to wonder if the problem isn’t technical so much as

behavioral.

I’m not quite sure what to do with a TV with emotional issues.

I’ve tried being extra nice to it, to make it a point to tell it

every day that it’s a good TV. I’ve tried giving it its “space,”

thinking that if I didn’t put pressure on it, it might resolve its

issues on its own. But the problems have only gotten worse.

The trouble started when one of my co-workers told me about all

the fun she and her husband were having with their new TiVo. I had

heard about this strange device but had dismissed it as a glorified

VCR. “Ooh, a box that actually records TV shows -- who would have

thought such a thing possible?” I would say sarcastically.

But my co-worker insisted that her TiVo was much, much more than a

VCR.

“It’s completely revolutionized the way we watch TV,” she said.

“If you’re watching a live show and need to leave the room, you can

put it on pause. If you’re watching a game and missed a play, you can

actually rewind it to the spot you missed, then hit a button and

switch back to live time. And here’s the best thing: Once you start

recording shows, it figures out the kinds of shows you like and

actually tapes other shows it thinks you might enjoy, too. It ...”

She stopped talking when she noticed I had started to drool.

“That ... that’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard,” I

said. “I am so going to get one of those.”

Not if my cable company had anything to say about it, and it did.

I was told that my cable service simply wasn’t compatible with TiVo,

and that if I wanted TiVo, I’d have to switch over to satellite TV.

Fortunately, I was told, the cable company had just come out with its

own version of TiVo. It was called a Digital Video Recorder, or DVR.

The DVR could do just about everything TiVo could do, and it would

cost us only a few dollars more on our cable bill to have it

installed.

Personally, I felt our cable company was pulling yet another fast

one on me. I had a hard time believing that a DVR could easily be

added to our cable service while TiVo apparently was so sophisticated

it could only be used in cooperation with the space program. I

suspected that what was really going on was that TiVo sales were

cutting a slice out of the cable industry’s money pie, and the cable

industry really, really liked its pie. It didn’t want to share its

pie with anyone.

Still, I really, really liked TV, and the idea of being able to

pause and rewind live broadcasts was just too much to pass up. I

decided to give the DVR a try.

My first clue that things weren’t going to go as smoothly as I’d

like was when the cable guy showed up and seemed to know less about

installing a DVR than I did.

“You have to excuse me,” he said, embarrassed. “We just got these

things and no one’s really sure how they work.”

He nervously hooked up the DVR -- a silver, rectangular device

with lots of buttons and flashing lights -- then stood in the center

of the living room reading the instruction manual. He scratched his

beard. He sighed heavily. Finally, he picked up the remote control

and pressed a button. When a menu screen appeared on the TV, he

seemed relieved.

I found this lack of technical expertise disturbing. All my

previous experience with cable guys had led me to believe that they

each held doctorates in electronic home entertainment. You asked them

a question, and they gave you the right answer every time. Then,

suddenly, here was a cable guy who didn’t seem to know what he was

doing. It was worrisome, like hearing your doctor refer to one of

your body parts as a “thingamajig.”

“Well, here’s the brochure,” the cable guy said, handing me a slim

pamphlet. And he left.

Fortunately, I’m a huge TV junkie, and am never so comfortable as

when I have a remote in my hand. Within 30 minutes, I was operating

the DVR like I had been born with one in my crib.

And for the first week or so, life was never better. Whereas my

girlfriend, Sharon, and I used to be at the mercy of network

programmers, now we could pull up a menu of our favorite shows and

watch what we wanted to watch on demand. We paused. We

fast-forwarded. We spoke disparagingly of all the poor saps who

didn’t have the wherewithal to get their own DVR.

Then one day, I turned the TV on and found that the volume wasn’t

working. I hit the mute button on and off, but nothing happened. I

turned the volume all the way up. Nothing happened. Puzzled, I

switched to another channel and was almost blasted off the couch by

the sound of a Steven Seagal film at maximum volume. At first I

thought the problem was just with the channel, but over the next few

days it became clear it was systemwide. Some channels wouldn’t have

sound. Others would. Sometimes the volume would cut in after a few

moments. Sometimes it wouldn’t.

Sharon called the cable company, and was told that we needed to

turn the DVR off and turn it on again in order for the machine to

reboot and clear away any glitches that might have arisen. We did

this, and the problem instantly cleared up.

The next day, I turned the DVR on to discover it hadn’t recorded

the programs I had asked it to. I figured rebooting the system had

wiped out its settings, so I reprogrammed it. But after several more

days of missed shows, it became clear that the DVR was spontaneously

reprogramming itself. Some shows it would deign to record. Others it

would have nothing to do with. It was as if the machine had decided

it would record only so many episodes of “The West Wing” before

revolting.

Again, Sharon called the cable company. Again she was told there

was nothing wrong with the DVR -- it simply needed rebooting. Again,

we did so, and the problem went away. I found it particularly galling

that the remote control had no “reboot” button -- I was forced to get

up off the couch and turn the box off manually. This seemed to me a

giant step backward in remote-control technology.

Soon, other problems arose. Recorded programs would suddenly

freeze during playback and break up into a thousand digital images,

or the action would spontaneously speed up or slow down, as if the

actors were unsure where they were going. Then the sound problem

returned. And the recording problem.

Sharon and I have pretty much given up trying to get the cable

company to fix the problems. What’s become clear is that the DVR is

in its embryonic stages, technology in its infancy. And trying to get

it to work is, well, like asking a 2-year-old to program a VCR. Of

course you’re going to have issues.

The question for us now, as consumers, is whether we return the

DVR and go back to being at the mercy of network programmers, or keep

the machine and learn to live with its twitches and tics. It’s a

tough choice, because for all its faults, the DVR really has

revolutionized our television experience.

But the revolution, we’ve learned, will be televised badly.

* DAVID SILVA is a Times Community News editor. Reach him at (909)

484-7019, or by e-mail at david.silva@latimes.com.

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