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TiVo Lovers - NBC Must Be Stopped (odd start times are now all over their schedule)
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NBC Must Be Stopped (odd start times are now all over their schedule)
You know how NBC has had odd start (and end) times for their shows on Thursday nights? ER starting regularly at 8:59pm Central time, for instance. This is frustrating if, for instance, you have season passes for both ER and C.S.I.. If ER is the higher priority season pass, it will be recorded but C.S.I. over on CBS won't because of overlap (C.S.I. runs from 8pm-9pm Central time, so it's just that one minute overlap, but Tivo isn't smart enough to realize that). And if C.S.I. is higher on your season pass priority list, ER won't record for you. Unless you've tweaked your passes manually to make 'em reflect these odd times. Sigh.

Wellllll, when I started work on tv picks for the coming weeks, I noticed that NBC now appears to be making this a regular practice on just about every night of the week. Law & Order: SVU will start at 8:59pm Central time on Tuesday nights (where it'll conflict with my Less Than Perfect season pass for 8:30pm-9pm on ABC, among others. And even Ed on Fridays (now) starts at 7:59pm central time (ensuring a conflict with my Joan of Arcadia season pass on CBS). On and on it goes. Mostly with NBC's hour long shows for the next couple of weeks.

I'll be posting a big old reminder of this each day it matters at TVPicks.net and I'm gonna write or call folks at both NBC and Tivo about this next week sometime. It's just stupid and all kinds of bad. NBC and Tivo still have some kind of partnership, don't they? Do they realize they're making things difficult for folks who use Tivo? And it may mean that folks will miss some new episodes of NBC shows, depending on what shows they've given what priority in their season pass manager. Bleah!

Anyway. If you have any season passes for NBC shows, you may want to look over your season pass manager. Definitely go to your "To Do List" and look at "View Recording History" to see if any new episodes of shows you like aren't gonna record 'cuz of conflicts due to this crap.

Current Mood: annoyed annoyed

Comments
sinca From: [info]sinca Date: January 1st, 2004 05:15 pm (UTC) (Permalink)
That IS such a pain in the ass. I don't watch ER (yay for Without a Trace) so I haven't had to deal with it but now that it'll be screwing w/my Ed and Joan of Arcadia I might have to take action. hah.

Thanks for the reminder, I'll definitely take a peek at my season pass manager.
laurel From: [info]laurel Date: January 1st, 2004 05:30 pm (UTC) (Permalink)
Yeah, it hadn't been much of an issue for me either yet since I gave up on ER at the beginning of last season. Much prefer Without A Trace. But I tried to mention the conflict on my website, so folks who do watch ER would know.

But now that NBC is gonna do this with Law & Order: SVU, Las Vegas, Ed, ER, Law & Order, and maybe others . . . it's gonna be a huge mess. And, frankly, if it comes down to choosing between something on another network and something on NBC, I'm less likely to pick the NBC show 'cuz of this. (Well, except maybe for Ed, 'cuz it's a fave and they don't usually rerun it. The Law & Orders will get rerun a lot so I can always catch them some other time).
From: [info]songmonk Date: January 1st, 2004 05:24 pm (UTC) (Permalink)
Yeah, super annoying. I set a manual repeating recording for E.R. that starts on the hour, and then I set my VCR to record it too, just so I don't miss the beginning. So I watch the very beginning of E.R. on video tape and then switch over to my TiVo, b/c I HATE watching stuff on video tape!!

Oh, and I *also* have the higher priority E.R. season pass so that if CSI isn't on or is a rerun, then I get E.R. as normal in its entirety. :-)

brakusjs From: [info]brakusjs Date: January 1st, 2004 05:26 pm (UTC) (Permalink)
TiVo needs to implement negative padding here and now. With shows starting at 8:59 we should have the ability to end shows one minute before the hour. So far we can only pad extra minutes into a program, but we can't take them out so that it doesn't interfere with other season passes....
inisfair From: [info]inisfair Date: January 1st, 2004 06:09 pm (UTC) (Permalink)
Or maybe a flag that allows a season pass to record a partial episode in the event of a conflict like that.
zonereyrie From: [info]zonereyrie Date: January 1st, 2004 06:42 pm (UTC) (Permalink)
TiVo users don't matter. Seriously. Statistically DVR users are negligible. Worse than that, DVR users are very likely to skip the ads. And if you aren't watching the ads your really of no use to the network.

So NBC really doesn't give a damn if TiVo users are unhappy. They're more interested in people watching live and getting people to stop switching channels to other networks, and cramming it more ads into higher rated shows (to make more money).

TiVo could really do things to help here, and I've RFE'd several of them: http://www.megazone.org/TiVo-RFEs.html

In this case most importantly:
- Negative padding. You could negative pad neighboring shows.
- Soft padding. Tell the unit to pad every recording by X minutes - if there is no conflict.
- Record fragments. Tell the unit to record fragments of programs if it can't find a non-conflicted airing in the schedule.
ehintz From: [info]ehintz Date: January 1st, 2004 08:19 pm (UTC) (Permalink)
This is where the dual tuner on the DirecTiVo comes in real handy. Sure do miss it.
txtarheel From: [info]txtarheel Date: January 2nd, 2004 06:05 am (UTC) (Permalink)
Ah, but even that isn't enough during March Madness for us freaky college basketball fans. I'd *love* negative padding at the beginning. That way I can record only the second half of many games. The manual record option is a huge pain.
shadoh From: [info]shadoh Date: January 2nd, 2004 07:17 am (UTC) (Permalink)
Makes me glad to have dual-tuners!
psuedomeat From: [info]psuedomeat Date: January 2nd, 2004 07:34 am (UTC) (Permalink)
I emailed them and recomend you do aswell.
nbcshows@nbc.com
From: [info]curehero Date: January 17th, 2004 05:03 pm (UTC) (Permalink)
armchairceo From: [info]armchairceo Date: February 7th, 2004 01:01 am (UTC) (Permalink)

Re:

Thanks. I clicked on only "other" and pasted in the following:


Record partial episode on conflict (fragment recording). So many shows now (NBC in particular) are blocking three hours with a one hour show from 8:59 to 10:01. The higher priority show should "win" the overlap, but the other 59 minutes of the losing shows should still be recorded. This is SERIOUSLY hurting the value of TiVo for me. If I can not rely on the season pass functionality, I would consider leaving the service.

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