I awoke from the Dark Ages earlier this year when I decided to follow to follow the craze and order a DVR with my cable. Wow…I will never again watch live television. While the constant flow of new technology usually makes our lives a little simpler or at least a bit more hip, I could live without most of it… except a DVR.

Digital video recorders (like TiVo) record streaming video off of television onto a hard-drive-based storage box. Their greatest and most touted advantage is the ability to fast-forward through commercials. Half-hour television shows today average twelve minutes of commercials—almost half the show! With a DVR, you can watch almost double the television for the amount of time spent. In addition, there’s freeze frame, or the pause button, so that when a questionable referee call, important phone number, or great shot of Dr. McDreamy comes on, you can stop and freeze the screen for as long as you want. Generally, a DVR includes two lines, meaning you can watch one channel and record another or record two channels at the same time. You can also rewind and fast-forward on a channel while it continues to record. So, there is no worry about having to wait until a show ends to watch it. Start watching an hour-long show twenty minutes into it, and you will finish at the same time everyone else does. You will just be smarter and wiser because, instead of sitting on the couch watching the same commercial five times in a row, you got an extra twenty minutes of work done beforehand.

As for simplicity and ease of use, let’s just say it took me years to teach my baby boomer parents how to send and receive e-mail and they mastered DVR within about ten minutes. At about six bucks a month, there is no reason everyone shouldn’t appreciate the wonderful technology of DVRs—except, maybe, the advertisers who no longer get to intrude on hours of your precious time.