TIVO the next big game

With football season underway, I thought I'd post this time saving reminder about games.

This applies to big games you want to see, such as a your favorite college team or Sunday/Monday night football.

The sports media gang is smug in their belief that, unlike American Idol, they are TIVO-proof. You have to watch the games in real-time, right?

Yeah, if you are having a social event. But what if just YOU were watching the game? Do you really want to see the Dodge Ram commericals 28 times today??

Here's what you do; Set your TiVo or video recorder to record the game and put an extra hour on the end (adjust the recording seconds to record past the scheduled end of the program). This will protect you if the game goes into overtime.

Now go about your day; shower, go out to eat (where the game is NOT being televised), spend some time with your kids, play your guitar, work in the garden. NOTE: Don't surf the Net, you'll get score updates on any portal on the home page and it will spoil this for you.

You can come back to your TV in about one hour to ninety minutes and begin to watch the game in catch-up mode. If you TiVo through commercials, challenges and inuries -- you'll catch up the game somewhere in the fourth quarter. You'll still probably see the end of the game at the same time as the rest of your friends. You'll just be skipping all the filler, which you'll find is amost 40% of the total time!!!

I've recently resorted to this in watching football because of the new scam around the challenges of plays and the reviews (which are supposed to only take 2:00). If you'll notice, they immediately go to a commercial break when there is a review now. This is not only making the games longer, more importantly, it is creating new ad inventory that did not exist a few years ago! Who is the victim -- you.

So, TiVo the big game and take back a few hours of your life today. Or at least throw a party, so you can talk through and ignore all the useless commercial interruptions.