Dang, that's cool

Glen Dickson reported over on the B&C main page that later this year, TiVo will be giving subscribers to late-model TiVos access to YouTube videos. Subscribers to Series 3 TiVos with broadband connections – and those include HD TiVos – will be able to go out on the Internet, grab YouTube videos and watch them on their living-room flat screens. Imagine  watching “D**k in a Box” or “I’m F**king Matt Damon”  — why are the best digital shorts always accompanied by such inappropriate titles that I have to use asterisks to write them? — on your LCD flat screen. (Note that these $600 boxes are out of stock so other people also have come to the conclusion that this is a pretty cool idea.)

The proposition is almost too scary to consider. My twenty-something friends already spend an inordinate amount of time on YouTube – and I have to say that when one friend held up her Apple iTouch and played a Kanye West’s super-creepy “Flashing Lights”  video for us during a recent dinner out I was pretty impressed. Once these young ‘uns get their TiVos hooked up to YouTube I may never see them again.

What this tells us is that it’s just a short matter of time before the Internet and the TV are one. Gone will be primetime and daytime, it really will be just a matter of what we feel like watching. It’s almost too much choice – should I watch 40 videos on YouTube or catch up on the last episode of Lost or the past week of Stewart and Colbert or watch American Idol live or listen to a podcast or go out and actually see some live people? I already feel confused.