In Defenestration Corner, David Singer writes: Nero Wolfe. We've been watching the Nero Wolfe series on A&E and enjoying it a lot. But I guess we're thieves, because we use TiVo and skip the commercials. Of course, I don't remember signing any kind of contract requiring us to watch the commercials in the first place....maybe the contract is secretly encoded in the vertical blanking interval, along with the closed-captioning. .

IMHO, the media companies are totally out of whack in the crusade against digital media devices. I watch far more TV now with our Tivos (erm, yes, we have two) than I ever did. Until I started Tivoing, I watched at most an hour-90 minutes of TV a day, a little in the morning (CNNfn when Jack Cafferty was on) and usually a Law and Order rerun on A&E. Now we manage to catch NY1 in the morning and typically a couple shows at night. On the weekend we catch up with whatever we missed during the week. Sure, I skip through commercials (much the same as I did with taped shows on my VCR except that Tivo intentionally doesn't have the smarts to skip specifically over commercials like my VCR does). But, given that we pay to receive the signal in the first place (in our case over TWC but we're switching back to DirectTv as soon as we can get an appointment lined up) it's a tad presumptuous for Kellner to call skipping-ads as theft. I mean, there once was a time when Cable-TV meant relatively commercial-free TV. Now you get to pay to receive commercials (ever notice the growth in infomercials on channels which used to have programming 24 hours a day?) with content interspersed in between.