A couple years ago I wrote a blog entry about my (then 3-yr-old) daughter and her life with TiVo. Things haven't changed much on that front - we now have another child, who is two and also doesn't "get it" when we encounter non-TiVo TVs, so the "This TV is broken" explanation still works.

Today I realized that my 5-year anniversary as a TiVo owner is fast approaching, and decided to do a little math. The amount of TV I watch per day is slightly less than average, but close enough to get a feel for things.

Five years of average TV viewing (4 hrs/day according to a 1998 Neilsen study)
= 7,300 hours
= 10 1/4 months (of 24-hour days) of TV since 2000 (yikes!).

Average 16 minutes of commercials per hour of TV
= 1,947 hours
= over 11 1/2 weeks (of 24-hour days) of commercials! (98% of which I've missed thanks to TiVo)

That means that over the course of the past 5 years, average TiVo users got back nearly 3 months of their lives they would normally have given to Television Marketing.

I draw a few conclusions from this: A) I still watch more damn TV than I would like B) TV Commercials are expensive, and whoever spent their money on my theoretical 3 months of attention since 2000 paid for absolutely nothing. C) TiVo rules, but I already knew that.

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Amazon Light 4 - I'm still excited about winning a 2005 SXSW Web Award for this - and just found out the other day that there is indeed a trophy. I look forward to it arriving in the mailbox in the way any proud geek would. Also - AL4 got a nice writeup in an article about Website Spinoffs in the Christian Science Monitor. I'm most happy about that, since I am a long-time fan of the CSM.

Amazon.com - They're still cranking on UI experiments. They recently started an A-B test trying a new style of detail page with a gigantic product image. I made an annotated screenshot here. Not everyone will see this experiment, and depending on its performance, it may never see daylight again, who knows.

Web Content Mashups - Jon Udell has inspired some truly thoughtful moments with his Screencast and post about what he calls "Content, services, and the yin-yang of intermediation". When content is so readily available for retrieval, intermixing and general mashing, questions of ownership and rights really pile up. Using public APIs, screen-scraping, bookmarklets, Greasemonkey User Scripts, open data and the spontaneous integrations that result, we are just now starting to see a whole new world of dynamic possibilities.
 

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