Cringely has a fine piece on how the TiVo is changing television. (Like most of us, he’s using “tivo” as a generic term for PVRs, thus adding to the list of words that will confound copyeditors for years to come.) Mark, who led me to that link, notes that TiVo is great for small children, too.
As far as he’s concerned, other people don’t have TV; they have some weird contraption that looks like a TV but only plays his shows at certain times, and then only the newest ones, and then only once.
God knows I’d rather have a kid pressing buttons than trying to insert videotapes—or other vaguely rectangular objects—into a VCR whenever s/he wanted to keep a show.