Does NBC hate Tivo?
on 09.20.04, 02:06pm in life • comments (3)
[Gus Perez] Is NBC really making their start and end times for shows non-standard on purpose to screw up folks recording with DVRs? Nothing more frustrating than watching 95% of a show to find out that you missed the last 3 minutes because the show didn’t start on time. Frustrating.
Lately I’ve found this to be SUPER annoying. Since NBC purposely starting (and ending) shows at wierd times to screw up Tivo, it’s also been screwing up recording their own shows when I mixed previous season passes with some new ones.
For example: The Apprentice as a new season pass (which starts at 9PM). I already had ER in there (which now starts at 9:59PM and had a 2-3 minute padding to make sure I didn’t miss it). Well guess what? There’s a conflict so you can: a) record The Apprentice on Saturday or b) just miss it.
I unfortunatey found this out after this weekend and I missed several shows. Grr. I have to go edit my season passes now.
I’m not sure of the logic behind this. Then again it’s Monday morning, so not much makes sense anyways.
Brian Graf (September 20, 2004 @ 2:29 pm)
The really strange thing is that NBC seemed to be supporting TiVo since it’s the only major network that embeds the metadata in it’s commercials to support the Press Thumbs Up to Record feature. On one hand, they want users to easily record their shows. On the other hand, they are making it nearly impossible to record their shows reliably without manually tweaking.
Stacy (September 21, 2004 @ 6:08 pm)
You can set up manual season passes - which are also annoying, but they work. You then only miss the first minute of ER typically. I had to do that because I have a season’s pass to CSI (9-10) which was interfering w/ER at 10. Now I have a manual 10-11:05 (just in case) to catch ER and you usually only miss a portion. So stupid though that NBC does that. Just wish that you could customize the tivo even further - it only allows for 5 minute increments when scheduling the manual one - so you can’t do 9 - 9:59 and 9:59 - 11, you can only do 9:55 (guarantee that you will miss next week’s preview) or 10. LAME. Yes, I’m addicted to my tivo.
Duncan Mackenzie (September 24, 2004 @ 6:20 am)
As far as I can tell they do this to create lock-in, so that you can’t choose to watch a show on NBC from 9 to 10, after watching one from 8-9 on CBS and then 10-11 on the WB (who also embeds that tivo metadata now, by the way)
I don’t think Tivo is the specific target, it is everyone who might dare to watch more than one channel in an evening…