NBC launching attack on competitors by tweaking PVR owners?

PVR blog reader David Young pointed out some strange listings at NBC this upcoming fall season. Is something sinister going on?

Note the time of the Scrubs premiere show. It starts at 8:32PM. huh? Coupling is a new show that also sports an odd time slot: 9:27PM-9:58PM. ER starts at 9:59PM that same night. Friends runs for 47 minutes and is followed by a 39 minute long Will and Grace. What in the hell is going on? My TiVo is currently reporting these start times as the actual slots for this Thursday and next Thursday's line is mostly back to normal, but ER starts a few minutes early as well.

It appears that NBC might be doing this to tweak PVR owners wanting to record CSI or Survivor over on CBS opposite their shows. If you had a season pass for both CSI and ER (both shows would likely have audiences that overlap) and you wanted to record ER you wouldn't be able to tape CSI during the preceding hour, thanks to the minutes of overlap that would produce a conflict.

Is this how NBC is going to fight the other networks and TiVo owners? By subtle time shifting that requires viewers to cancel their programs on other networks? Didn't they invest a few million into the company a few years ago? What's going on here?

update: Several threads at the tivocommunity site covered this issue and manual hacks are shared. Theories range from NBC trying to steal viewers at CBS to NBC trying to pad ER's higher ad rates as much as possible and spread their audience out to other NBC shows that are offset. Any way you look at it, a lot of TiVo owners are pissed.

Comments

[James Spahr]

Wouldn't their little ploy backfire if I have NBC shows in a lower slot in my season passes? (Hey look, It does -- I guess I'm not watching NBC anymore).

Well, my ER season pass is foobar'd because of this (it's fairly low in my passe, and the daily show is more important -- so poof! no more ER), but Law and Order seems to be playing nicely with others (thankfully so).

I guess I could do a manual recording, but that kind of defeats the purpose of TiVo, now doesn't it?

[Shawn]

I can't imagine having Tivo without dual tuners. Problem solved.
Of course, it didn't help last night when I wanted to record the premieres of both Las Vegas and CSI: Miami while watching MNF. Luckily, the Broncos took a huge early lead and I watched LV live and recorded CSI.

[Peter]

Everyone really needs to calm down. The fact is NBC has had these wacky schedules for their Thursday shows for at least the last 2 or 3 years. They just now decided to list the start and end times accurately. Normally Friends ends at 8:32 and ER starts at around 9:58 or 9:59. But special "super-sized" or premiere/finale episodes always have these wacky 39 or 47 minute long episodes. Last year people complained that they were missing the end of Friends or the begining of ER, well this is NBC listening to all of you! Stop complaining, this is exactly what you asked for!

[Matt Haughey]

Last year people complained that they were missing the end of Friends or the begining of ER, well this is NBC listening to all of you! Stop complaining, this is exactly what you asked for!

When people complained, they wanted the shows to start at the correct time, not have times shift to special slots that mess up TV listings, printed guides, and devices that rely on those listings like TiVo.

Is it really that hard to edit one hour's episode of ER down by 60 seconds so it won't wreak havoc on all the dependent systems? If they were ballooning the show up by a half hour, I could see that, or even 15 minutes, but one minute? That's a pointless shift.

[Roger Benningfield]

Matt: I disagree completely. As Peter points out, the TiVo community has been complaining about shows running over and under their scheduled times for years now. That practice absolutely will not stop... it helps them retain non-PVR viewers.

We should applaud them for taking our needs into account for once and providing accurate scheduling data. Any TiVo owner who cares about NBC's programming has been forced to fiddle with scheduling since the debut of Survivor: Outback, so nothing's changed... except that we now know exactly how much we need to pad to get things done.

[Peter]

It isn't so much that they can't edit out 1 minute out of ER, it is that they don't want to get rid of 2 extra 30 second commercials. That is why ER starts early and probably why Friends runs long. Those couple of extra ad spots gives NBC millions more. Yes it is wrong that they are doing this, and the shows should be exactly 30 and 60 minutes long, but at least now our TiVos will see these few extra minutes.

[Rob]

How is it 'wrong' that they are doing this? Ridiculous.

[Jim]

Good for me I stopped watching ER after watching the first couple episodes last year. It's just lost the edge. I still season pass Friends and Survivor so like others couldn't live without my dual tuner DirecTV TiVo.

[spike lee]

GET A LIFE!!

[Dave]

I'll tell ya what... All it's going to do is make the PVR's decide what to record. One show will get recorded while the other show doesn't.

Does that piss me off... Not really. I'll be annoyed the first time, but then I'll go into the PVR and set up which show I really want to watch and which one I can live without.

What's really amusing is, it's going to piss off people with regular VCR's who tape the shows and find that they don't get all the show because their recorder doesn't know that the show is running longer, or that the show started 5 minutes early, etc...

As far as ad's go... We don't watch them, period. It's very rare indeed that we watch a program on TV live anymore. We consider ads simular to pop-up ads on the computer. We use the 30 second fast forward (thanks TiVo for leaving that little hack in) hack and happily skip all these stupid ads.

[TiVo Lover]

Bottom line- Survivor & CBS wins- and I don't record Will & Grace. NBC Loses. That was easy.

[Ruidh]

I've got to agree with Matt. This kind of scheduling has got to involve getting more ad minutes in their highly rated shows. That means real $$$s. That it may give NBC shows a boot in a tiny sliver of the market makes a sound like a pin dropping on the carpet in the halls of NBC. It's clear from the comments here that the boost may actually be a negative.

I'd much rather have accurate start and stop info. I mean, you guys check the TO DO list a few times a week? Right? If you don't you shouldn't be surprised. There's plenty you can do to fix the programming once you have accurate start and end times.

[Dave]

I don't have a Tivo, but I have ReplayTV, so I don't know if the situtation is similar or not. For me, I get accurate start and stop times with the guide, but what will happen is if there was a show that goes 8:30-9:00 but the other show on a lower channel goes from 8:27-9:58, the latter will be the one recorded. It's actually better than that with the last software upgrade, but that's the basic gist of it.

[David]

I have little ire for NBC on this. The networks are going to do things like this, and there is no point complaining about it. However I'd really like to see TiVo do something about it. TiVo needs to get smarter about handling conflicts *automatically*. If I have to go in hand-adjusting start/stop offset times for every Season Pass, then TiVo really begins to lose its effectiveness.

[Charles]

I watched the schedule closely tonight. One conflict was CSI on CBS ending at 9PM and ER starting at 8:59PM. I noticed that the actual CSI program ended at 8:57, but the time slot listed it as ending at 9PM after 3 min of commercials.
It is time for TiVo schedules to reflect the actual starting and ending times of the PROGRAM, not the time slot including commercials. I can't count all the times I recorded some movie on HBO and got 10 minutes of promos after the show ended. There is no excuse for this. I want accurate, to-the-minute listings for the CONTENT, not the advertising. This will save disk space and avoid conflicts like this. If we're lucky, there will be a battle between the channels, to determine who can trim the most fat from their listings.

[David]

I found it interesting that even with the supposedly more accurate times on Thursday night, a few minutes of Will & Grace still showed up on the end of Friends, and likewise for Coupling after Will & Grace.

[Roger Benningfield]

David: Yeah... that irritated me no end. Here I am, defending NBC's scheduling tweaks on the grounds that accurate, non-standard start times are better than inaccurate, non-standard start times, and what do they do? Add a whole new layer of inaccuracy to the process. Lovely.

[The Zedd]

This reminds me of something you tv and movie finatics/buffs should be able to decipher:

"I got a few words for all y'all.. GET A LiFE!"

hint: GI60's

- Z

[Doug Ferguson]

I love your PVR blog, although the term DVR is slowly overtaking the original PVR term, at least in media articles over the past two years. Even the proprietary researchers (e.g., Jennifer Choate at C Cubed LLC) are changing from PVR to DVR.

Speaking of research, I hope you'll tout my survey about DVRs. It's at www.cofc.edu/~ferguson/survey.htm

I have two waves already, from 2000 and 2001. So far, my third wave of data, which includes a question about length of ownership, indicates at least one difference between new and old Tivo users. Apparently, early adopters lose some of their ad-skipping zeal, once they've had their TiVo for a couple years. It must be the novelty factor wears off a little, which might be solace to the advertising community.

[Ben]

I had read a while back that they were cutting short/changing the start and stop times of shows in order to insert "mini-shows"... basically like one-off and test projects so people keep watching through to the next show.

[Michael]

They're doing it again in the first week of January. Here's what I posted to the TiVoCommunity Forum's Season Pass Alerts:

It appears that NBC is playing games with their start times again. Several shows in early January have odd start and/or end times that may cause conflicts with shows on other networks. For example:

1/5 - Las Vegas 8:59 - 9:59
1/5 - Average Joe Hawaii 9:59 - 11:00
1/6 - Frasier 9:00 - 9:31
1/6 - Law & Order SVU 9:59 - 11:00
1/7 - Law & Order 9:59 - 11:00

You may want to keep an eye on NBC's shows in case you need to do some modifications to your To Do list.

[David Dutton]

Tivo can EASILY do something to fix this, and it's a SIMPLE software patch. right now we can pad shows to START EARLY and END LATE. They just need to patch it to allow us to START LATER and END EARLY.. adding those "reverse" padding options will solve the conflicts. You just reverse pad NBC's programs and problem solved. Why Tivo hasn't fixed this is beyond me.

[Clarke Bell]

Imagine if the other networks took up the same idea, and each one picked start and stop times wherever the mood took them (trying to get more advertising bucks or more viewers or any other crazy idea.) What would we then have???? CHAOS of course. The networks have kept to hour and half-hour start times to enable smooth transitions between channels according to the taste of the viewer. This NBC idea can only make things more difficult for TiVo owners, VCR owners, and live TV watchers. In short, everybody!!!

[Karen]

Well I know that I've 'given up' a lot of my favorite NBC shows because of their games.

I've cancelled my "Friends", "Will & Grace", "ER", "Third Watch" & "Ed" Season Passes because of it. I originally thought about programming a manual recording for the shows with odd start/end times, but after thinking about it I realized I was just playing into their stupid game and said screw it.

"Friends" & "ER" are two shows I would have given a higher positioning so I wouldn't miss them in case of a conflict. But, I'm not going to sit back and be manipulated by the a-holes at NBC.

NBC needs to get a grip!