As a long time Tivo owner I’ve grown very accustomed to the luxury of watching TV on my schedule and not that of the television networks. When the wife and I have a free block of time and want to watch one of the few television programs we enjoy together, or watch a show alone quickly to get back to spending time together the DVR is a great asset. Our favorite shows are recorded and we can just pick what we’re in the mood for and watch it right then and there.
All modern DVRs offer the ability to record only new episodes of a show. Recently when upgrading to HD TV service we’ve put aside our Tivo and moved to Comcast’s provided DVR. The reason for doing this is quite simple, it’s a lot cheaper! The Comcast device does not offer nearly as attractive of a user interface as the Tivo, it’s a bit more complicated to use and unfortunately it has a few hiccups we msut deal with but it does its job well enough.
Recently I have realized a major problem however. As the new seasons of shows are shortly to begin many networks are airing “marathons” of their shows so you can re-watch or first catch-up on what happened last season. My DVR, while set to only record the new episodes, is grabbing tons of these shows and filling itself up almost constantly. This bothers me as I am continiously deleting items and often sitting in front of the DVR for blocks of time going through the next few days recording schedule to wipe off things it shouldn’t be recording.
I’ve done some research as to why this is happening and have learned a few things that disappoint me greatly. In this day and age when every cable and satellite provider offers DVRs I find these issues to be unnacceptable and they make me as a consumer believe that the networks and other companies involved are doing their customers a large disservice.
Laziness on the side of the networks:
First and foremost of an issue is that some of the television networks are just plain lazy. I’ll use two networks and specific shows as an example. USA Networks Burn Notice is about to air its final episode of the season on Thursday and they’ve been re-playing the entire season over-and-over throughout the day. The service that provides the guide and program information for DVRs relies on the networks to upload information to them. USA has chosen not to give information and in the cases that they have they do not notify the service that these are repeats. The DVR doesn’t see that it’s a repeat as it’s not flagged as such and things that every episode being aired, all sharing a non-descriptive description, are new.
Bravo Network has taken it one step further and airs their Project Runway so often that my DVR could fill up on it in just a matter of days. They, just like USA, are not putting in notification that the episode is a repeat but they’ve taken it a step worse. They’re neglecting to put ANY description in and airing ten episodes in a single day! So not only does your DVR record every episodes but even if you wanted an older one that you missed you’d never be able to tell which one it is!
These two shows and networks are not the only ones. Shotime’s Weeds, HBO’s Entourage and numerous others are all cluttering my DVR to the point that last night a show I wanted to see was not recorded!
Stupidity on the side of I-Guide:
From what I have read very recently I-Guide, the leader in interactive guide services for cable boxes and other services, has upgraded to a new database server/system. In this upgraded they dropped the values for “initial airing”. Now your DVR, or self if using other services, can not tell when the show was originally aired and thus is unable to determine its status of new, repeat etc. Did they think that this was un-important information or where they simply hoping the TV networks would always be accurate?
In either case, we now have two major contributers to DVRs being unable to do what the user wants easily and leaving people like me having to strongly fight the urge to remove these programs and networks in general from their season pass / serries recording lists. The shows are “alright” but the trouble involved now in getting them and mantaining the sanity of my DVR usage is too much!
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