I recently bumped into an old friend of mine that I hadn’t seen in quite awhile. In the typical fashion, we caught up on life and the barrage of questions included “What are you doing now?” “Are you married?” and “Do have any kids?” When we landed on the children question, an interesting conversation transpired that revolved around how he controls his kids TV-watching habits.

To my surprise, the main tool in the TV control epiphany focused on DVRs (Digital Video Recorders) or you may also have heard of Tivo. What blew me away was that his kids have never seen LIVE TV because everything was being pre-recorded and stored on his DVR’s 80 gig hard drive. He told me that he was accomplishing two things by pre-screening TV. He was controlling the show choices that his kids could watch. My buddy was also discouraging his children from being glued to the TV because he would only play one episode at a time. There was no block of programming that his kids could comprehend. The “Teletubbies” didn’t follow “Mr. Rogers” because the shows were being played out of traditional order. In my research about DVRs, I found out later that this is called time shifting.

What else is so great about a DVR instead of your old VCR (Video Cassette Recorder) is that you can hold so much more content on your digital hard drive than on the traditional videocassette. You can also pause live TV, replay of interesting scenes, and skip advertising with this device. Tivo will also make suggestions of other TV shows you should watch based on your viewing habits. What do these devices cost? Tivo and DVRs cost about $99 for the unit and then about $10- $20 a month for the service.

With our increasing schedules and the amount of channels and programming that we now have available to us Tivo gives us the flexibility to watch a multitude of shows whenever we want. Tivo and DVRs are reshaping the way we watch TV because they make it more easy and convenient to control what we watch and when we want to watch it. In this case, here an idea to use DVRs to effectively control what your kids watch.