I don't know how we ever got by without a HD DVR. The excitement of Christmas 1985 still sticks in my mind. That was the year Dad put a much longed-for item under the tree: a spectacular new video cassette recorder. As one of three teenagers still left in the house, I was as excited as my brother and sister were about our new opportunities to tape whatever we wanted—especially music videos. The VCR was huge, and so was its price tag, but it really made a difference in the way our family managed its entertainment hours.
Within 20 years, the HD DVR had become relatively common, and TiVo was a household word. Then cable and satellite TV companies began integrating digital recording capabilities into their decoder boxes, but I still resisted due to the subscription fees (I wasn’t sure I’d use it enough to offset the cost) and the temptation: I feared I’d spend too much time recording and viewing shows with time I’d otherwise spend reading, socializing, exercising—and housecleaning. So I continue to enjoy the fruits of the digital video recorder at the homes of others, such as my favorite aunt and uncle, who I dearly love to visit.
Aunt Terri and Uncle Dick live in southwest Florida, a long way from their treasured Boston Red Sox. Although Terri is more a consumer of novels, Dick loves his television—especially baseball—and I’m with him all the way! Since I live in the Boston area I have a healthy affinity for the team (as long as it’s not one of those very rare occasions where they are playing my Mets), and I’m happy to watch them whenever I can.
Lucky for me, during my last visit to the subtropics a very special event was taking place in Japan: the Red Sox were opening the season against the Oakland Athletics. Yes, two U.S. teams were playing a pair of regular-season games before capacity crowds in that baseball-loving country. Of course, what was primetime there was the wee hours of the morning to us in the western hemisphere. But all’s well in the modern world: Uncle Dick has a digital video recorder, and he can run it like a pro!
The morning of the first ballgame I emerged from the guest room to find my uncle in his recliner, remote in hand. The game had started a couple of hours earlier, but thanks to digital video recorders we were looking at the top of the third. I settled into an armchair and enjoyed the luxury: the game wasn’t quite live, but that handy digital-recording device could have fooled me. The point was we didn’t know what was happening in the non-delayed reality of that domed stadium on the other side of the world: the action was unfolding on the screen as if it were happening live.
By fast-forwarding through commercials and pitching changes, Uncle Dick gained time on real-time, although we knew we weren’t quite at the point where we could suspend the recording and join the live action on regular TV. Then the phone rang. My uncle looked at the Caller I.D. and raised his eyebrows. “Oh, it’s Bob!” he informed Aunt Terri and me, referring to his good friend and fellow rabid Red Sox fan. Realizing that Bob must have just watched the end of the game and our DVR-governed game was still in the 8th inning, he did what he had to do to keep the outcome unknown. He hit the phone’s connect button and without any pauses between words and sentences, he said, “Hi Bob I recorded the game and we’re still watching it so I’ll call you back when we’re done, bye!”
We turned our attention back to the game, where the Sox were trailing by a couple of runs. They were running out of chances, and we were a bit dejected—we didn’t want them to travel all the way to and from Asia without a notch in the victory column.
Then Uncle Dick perked up. “Wait a second,” he said. “Bob only calls me if the Red Sox win. So they must have pulled this one out! They must have come back to win it!” So instead of dreading the ninth inning, we were bolstered with hope. And sure enough, they tied it up and later won it. How about that?
Besides giving me a memory to smile at, my first experience watching sports on a HD DVR made me think of the ways the device could expand my home entertainment options and change my enjoyment of television for the better. I haven’t upgraded my satellite receiver yet, and I’m not sure what am I waiting for. Life, after all, doesn’t come with a rewind button.
