When News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch recently suggested he might put free digital video recorders in DirecTV’s 10 million subscriber homes within a year of taking control of the company from Hughes Electronics, the sound of hearts stopping along 6th Avenue was deafening.
     Up until now the broadcast TV industry pretty much pooh-poohed DVRs (or PVRs, your choice) since there are only about 800,000 TiVos in homes today.
    But a report by the Yankee Group estimates that by 2007 nearly 20 percent of all U.S. homes will be able to fast-forward TV commercials.
     Right now analysts believe that News Corp. owns all the technology it needs to replace TiVo at some point, and News Corp.'s BSkyB is already essentially distributing free DVRs throughout Great Britain's more mature multi-channel market.
     Meanwhile, DirecTV rival EchoStar recently put DVR Replay into its set-top boxes, while several cable providers, including Time Warner Cable and Cox Communications, have begun to offer DVRs to their customers.
     I only bought a TiVo unit when I read that TiVo, under pressure from the TV industry, had agreed not to include that all important commercial-skipping feature in its future models.
    Certainly, there are some things not to like about TiVo.
     If you have it in your bedroom it makes as much noise as an air conditioner. It is nigh-on impossible to watch a different channel while it is recording. And sometimes the commercial-skip feature bites off a little of the program, too.
    But even with those shortcomings, the device is a godsend.
     Has the TV industry learned anything from the record industry? Since their initial reaction was to try and get DVRs outlawed, then pressure DVR makers to eliminate the commercial-skip feature, it appears not.
     Will we have to sit through commercials where TV industry hairdressers and sound technicians whine about how DVRs are going to hurt the “little people?”
    Rather than embrace the inevitable march of technology and figure out how to accommodate their viewing public--who in time will put the $60 billion spent annually on all forms of television advertising in real jeopardy--broadcasters are doing everything they can to alienate them.
     There are more commercial interruptions than ever in history, approaching a full third of every hour on some channels. Lynch mobs are already on the path of the network executive who invented those translucent logos that now permanently reside in the lower right hand corner of nearly every show.
    Pop-ups that cover content were and are hugely unpopular online, so whose grand idea was it to port them over to TV? Like we won’t mind because they are program promos?
     Sooner or later the TV titans will turn to the viewing public for support on issues relating to commercial skipping, and it simply won’t be there.
     All the nonsense about commercial-ladened “free” programming will fall on deaf ears, since everybody is already paying either a cable company or satellite provider to get decent reception (and "The Wire" and" Street Time," along with "The Sopranos," "Sex in the City," "Carnivale" and "Six Feet Under"). So nobody thinks TV is “free” anymore.
    If Jennifer Aniston wants to hold you guys up for $2 million a show, that’s your problem, not mine.
     I managed to get through three or four leading detectives on "NYPD Blue" and major cast changes on "ER" without missing a show.  I believe I can live without her, too.
     Besides, there is something weird about a business where you can come in nearly last in the ratings and still make gobs of money.
    Sooner or later, advertisers are going to realize that they are throwing good money after bad down the black hole of “lower ratings but new, higher prices.”
    DVRs just might be what gets them there.