Now that I have 2 kids, I am much more aware of the world and how it affects them. During the last couple decades, there is another area where ethics have been the lowest priority and money has been the highest; Marketing. Recently marketing has been taken to a whole new level.  Unethical marketing companies have found that a huge number of American suffer from low self esteem. Now they have practically perfected using this weakness to trick people into buying stuff.  In hundreds of subtle ways, they tell everyone that you can’t be happy unless you own our special piece of junk. These people have helped drive anti-depressant usage to record levels by making everyone think the are incomplete because they don’t own everything they see on commercials. When I comes to my kids, I want to protect them from being manipulated.

About 10 years ago, a small company called Sonic Blue developed a product that helps regular people battle the unethical marketing companies. I think the Replay TV is the best consumer electronics product ever sold. I would rank it up there with the Iphone (but for a different reason) as a great product. The Replay TV is a personal video recorder that detect inaudible signals that are part of the video transmission and uses this information to automatically skip from the beginning to the end of each group of commercials. It does this seamlessly about 95% of the time. I purchased one of these products 9 years ago, hoping that the product would work for 3 years before the evil commercial companies would sue the Sonic Blue out of business.  The product has worked perfectly now for 9 years. My kids have almost never seen a commercial and it has had a major effect on them.

Last Christmas, we were out with friends discussing Santa and gifts for the kids. Our friend’s kids had huge lists of commercial products that they wanted from Santa. My kids did not know what to ask for. My daughter wanted a big flower that she could sit in. Because of the Replay TV, her mind was not full of desire for disposable junk and other things that marketing companies tricked her into wanting.

During the past year, I purchased 2 more Replay TVs to keep in case my current one eventually fails. I got them on Ebay for $175 with a lifetime subscriptions so there are no monthly fees to get the programming guide. Since they use the same database as TiVO, they should continue to work for years. The later versions have additional features like video sharing. The newer product can send video to your computer over your home network, where you can save it. You can also download videos (that others have recorded on their Replay TVs) from the web at DVarchive.org and send them directly to your TV.

TiVO is a far inferior product that has been well marketed so they have dominated the standalone PVR market. The Replay TV is one of the best consumer products ever build but very few people know about it and the unethical marketing organizations like it that way. If you want to live the commercial free lifestyle, buy a used Replay TV with a lifetime subscription. It can really change the way you your kids see the world, it saves you time every day (watching a one hour show in forty minutes) and it helps keep the marketing companies out of your head.