The television will be revolutionized

This paper investigates television-watching practices amongst early adopters of personal hard-disk video recorders (PVRs such as TiVotm) and Internet downloading of shows. Through in-depth interviews with early adopters, we describe how the rhythms of television watching change when decoupled from broadcast TV. For both the PVR users and downloaders TV watching has become less of a passive process, with viewers instead actively gathered shows from the schedules or online, and watching shows from their stored collection. From these results we discuss the ‘video media lifecycle’, and three new design concepts for supporting TV watching.