Jessie and I have a DVR through Time Warner Cable. We love it. We’re hooked. It completely changes the television watching experience and allows us to watch shows when it’s convenient for us instead of when some network big shot decides when the best time to air it is. I would say of the shows we watch regularly, we only catch maybe one or two a week when they’re actually “live”.

That being said, I have a few suggestions for how the companies that manufacture these DVR units can drastically improve their features:

• Add another TV tuner. They’ve already got two TV tuners inside the box, allowing it to record two things at once or record one thing and watch something else, but if you want to record three things simultaneously or record two things and watch something besides those two, you’re out of luck.
• I understand why advertisers feel the need to broadcast their commercials at twice the volume that the program itself is broadcasting at, but at some point they’ve gotta realize that consumers aren’t going to buy a product if their ad campaign annoys the shit out of people. Cars have technology that auto-adjust the volume of the radio depending on outside noise, would it be that hard for cable boxes to auto-adjust the volume to keep the decibels at relatively even levels when it switches over from programming to commercials and from channel to channel?
• People pirate, it happens, get over it. Just like when people used to record copyrighted content on to *GASP* VHS tapes, they do it now with DVDs. My DVR has a SATA hookup as well as a USB hookup that are completely useless. Allow me to “back up” recorded shows so that I can view them again! Yes, I know I can always go out and buy a DVD burner to hook up to the video output of the DVR, but why do that when I already have the technology on my computer and it’s just a software limitation of the DVR preventing me from connecting the two.
• Ok, last one: Give it a larger hard drive. Sometimes I don’t get around to watching everything that week or even the next week. With HD programming readily available for many popular channels, it should be able to store more than a week or two’s worth of HD programs.

That’s it! If you had the attention span to read this far, I applaud you.