I think I'm going to want one of these:

SOONER or later, the technologies of the various areas of our lives merge, resulting in a savings of cost, cables and clutter. For the nightstand, you can buy a clock-radio-telephone. In the car, you've got one radio-CD-player-heating-control unit. In your pocket, a Swiss Army knife.

But the area around the TV is still a mess. By the time you've installed your cable box, VCR, TiVo and DVD player-recorder, you've built a techno-tower crisscrossed by cables and overrun by remotes. If ever an area cried out for consolidation, the TV room is it.

The industry has taken a few tentative steps in that direction: combo VCR-DVD players fill the shelves at Costco and Circuit City, and Toshiba recently unveiled a $400 TiVo with built-in DVD player. But those early attempts should bow down before the sweet perfection of a new pair of hybrids: Pioneer's new DVR-810H and Elite DVR-57H.

Each of these remarkable machines is a TiVo recorder, DVD player and DVD recorder in a single box, with one remote that also controls your TV.

The TiVo part means that you can freeze, rewind or instantly replay whatever you're watching; record a show (or, rather, a lot of shows) on its built-in hard drive for instant playback at any time; and skip over ads. Above all, a digital video recorder, or DVR, like TiVo permanently disconnects the broadcast time from the – viewing time. By the time TiVo zealots – which is pretty much everyone who has ever bought one - blip over the ads, credits, recaps and promos, they can watch a one-hour show in about 35 minutes. No wonder they never, ever watch whatever junk happens to be on at the moment.

I also think I know how I'm going to do this. I'm not going to be a pioneer purchaser. I'm going to wait until my friends are paying £500 for their Giant Gizmo DVDivo Whatsits, and I'll hem and I'll haw and then eighteen months later I'll buy one for £150. At which point, I rather think, that will be it. Better technologies than this will become available for couch potatoing, but as with CDs and their subsequent rivals, I'll then be happy with what I have.