The TV industry is busy wringing its hands over illegal torrenting, Hulu, and whatever else. Meanwhile, I’m happy for this alternative: Twitter. Twitter is the best thing to happen to long, boring stuff I may or may not want to watch. A few times for work, I’ve had to live-Tweet said long, boring stuff — namely music awards shows, live feeds, whatever.

But when I’m off-duty and on the fence, I need only monitor my timeline to see if I need to bother hitting “on” (or maybe “play,” if a network is savvy enough to stream online). Case in point, the recent MTV VMAs.

I trust the opinion of most of the people I follow on Twitter so just by following, I got a pretty good real-time recap of what was going on — and no motivation to watch. Thanks to Twitter, I can multitask and keep working on other stuff and know (and continue to not care) that Lady Gaga wore a meat dress. Thanks, Twitter pals, for saving me a few hours.