I've noticed that TV companies are getting increasingly aggressive in their attempt to win my share of TiVo, and I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore (probably).
We've been a TiVo household for going on 5 years now, and have gotten to the point where only our kids watch live TV. Completely dedicated to watching our shows how and when we want, the TiVo has become our RSS feed to the networks, as we set our Season Passes and trust they will be delivered.
But lately, I noticed shows kept not recording, especially newer additions like American Inventor. Then I realized why - for the last few weeks, ER has been starting at 9:59pm. The only reason to break out of the grid system by one minute can be to defeat a TiVo, because if one show doesn't end till 10pm and another begins at 9.59, TiVo will not (as a human would) just end one show a minute early, it will see them as a conflict, and record one or the other, depending on a preferential order determined by my list of season passes. And as that list - unless I manually change it - is ordered by date of addition, then older shows will always trump newer upstarts.
So, I propose to create a “Grid Insurgents”, those shows who pathetically attempt to keep an audience away from another network by starting or ending their show one minute before or after the top of the hour. I'll start by nominating Lost, ER and American Inventor, all of whom try this tactic - feel free to add to the wall of shame in the comments.
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You need to treat yourself to a new TiVo. Mine (a Series 2 model from 2004) takes those sneaky clipping tactics into account, recording the overlapping minute of the program rated higher in your queue.
TiVo already has this, it is called Overlap Protection. I believe it is only on the standalone TiVo, since DirecTV withholds most of the good features from their customers using the DirecTiVo units. With Overlap Protection if two recordings overlap by 5 minutes or less, the TiVo will record both programs but it records all of the higher priority program and clips the lower priority program to allow for the overlap. Users can enable or disable overlap protection as they prefer.
For dual-tuner TiVos, like the new S2DT, then it will record two programs in full if they overlap, one on each tuner. If there were three programs, say a top priority from 20:00 to 21:02, a second priority from 20:59 to 22:00, and a third from 21:00 to 22:00 - then the first two would be recorded in full, using both tuners because of the three minute overlap. Then the third would have the first two minutes clipped, to allow for the first show to finish at 21:02.
It doesn't really bother me, because I don't watch much network television. Most of what I watch is on cable - which doesn't do this very often, and the shows repeat a lot so even if I missed on it'd find it later. So I don't use clipping, I just get the full airing later.