Public Service Announcement
January 15th, 2006
If you’re TiVoing the premiere of 24 tonight, you need to add 15 minutes on to the recording. The start was delayed for football.
Categories: random
If you’re TiVoing the premiere of 24 tonight, you need to add 15 minutes on to the recording. The start was delayed for football.
I was trapped waiting in the pick-up area at IKEA when 24 came on and then I started to panic that I wouldn’t be home in time to manually record the final 15 minutes of the show. My TiVo gets every episode of Rocketboom now and it lets me buy movie tickets and listen to streaming podcasts — why can’t they send out an update to their boxes when something like this happens? (By the way, it looks like my comment is longer than your post. Maybe this explains why I’m such a bad blogger.)
Mike – the TiVo hardware relies on program listings from Tribune Media Services, the same company that publishes TV Guide and the Zap2It.com website. In order for boxes deployed in homes across the country to get a schedule modificaton due to a program overrun, two things would need to happen:
1) TMS would need to update their listings appropriately.
2) The individual TiVo boxes would have to know to look for a program listing update before the Primetime schedule kicks in. (This is relatively easy for the newer, internet-programmable Series2 boxes, but Series1 boxes rely on the daily phonecall for program listing updates. And since there’s no way to tell your box when to make the call – there’s only a menu option to trigger the call manually – Series1 owners would be out of luck.)
I have a Series2 box, I have a broadband-connected Series2 box! My machine should be smart enough to know that a program happening after a primetime sporting event might be impacted if that event goes long. Or all sorts of other things I haven’t thought of but that the smartypantses at TiVo should figure out. Thanks for the info, M-D. I can put metal in my new microwave, I still don’t have a flying car — I’d put sports event-aware DVR somewhere in between those two on the future stuff scale.