Ad-lapsing, or TV plus or minus ten minutes

Appointment television ceased to be appointment television when we all got TiVos. We could skip the ads so we skipped the ads. Then we all got Twitter, and appointment television became appointment television again because what's the fun of watching Xfactor or The Apprentice or Dr Who the day after the twitter stream has flown by?

There's a couple of possible solutions to this, but the one that strikes me as most obviously achievable without the invention of any new technology is for us all to agree to a minor conspiracy.

Let's just watch the stuff 10 minutes after it starts. Start the show up, stick it on pause immediately, and then ten minutes later all unpause it together. Then we can all skip the ads together too. Happily Twitter would be the perfect way to coordinate this as well, so the problem becomes the solution in a way that is both elegant and slightly amusing.

Half the fun of watching scheduled TV is the accompanying Tweets. But without a bit of coordination that bit of fun forces us to watch the damned ads or risk spoilers and irrelevance. So let's just agree to watch everything ten minutes after it starts, stick up a hashtag like #apprentice+10 or #xfactor+10 and we can go back to ad-skipping (nearly) live TV. 

(Photo by dustinaskins on Flickr)