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American Idol and TiVo

The LA Times picked up on this week's finale show, which ran about 6-8 minutes long: TiVo users 'Idol's' big loser.

During the season, the show never went long but for the final episode, they were several minutes off, to the point at which when my TiVo was finished playing the show, they hadn't even gotten to the drumroll and final verdict yet. Luckily, I was only about 15 minutes behind the present time, and I could shift over to the Live TV buffer and see the ending.

In the future, always remember to pad your live recordings by at least ten minutes (big sports games, I add one hour, oscars I add 2 hours extra).

by Matt Haughey May 24, 2007 in News

Comments

I recall the show pushed House back by 2-3 minutes a couple of times this season. I'm not an Idol fan, but I do remember seeing it on my House recordings when it ran over.

Posted by: Scott Johnson at May 24, 2007 9:37:38 PM

The thing is that it's not as though they had 2 hours of good or even relevant content to make it worthwhile. We ended up fast-forwarding through just about everything. Blech.

Posted by: Jemaleddin Cole at May 25, 2007 5:35:25 AM

This brings up a question I was planning on sending to some of the TiVo related blogs:

When you set a live event to occur, it prompts you to pad it now. What happens in the case of a program that's part of a season pass? Is there a tag/flag that TiVo knows refers to a live event? If so, is there a way for the TiVo to prompt the user, at the point that it gets the guide data for a season pass episode, to somehow alert the user and ask them if they want to pad that one episode? It would have been great (for my wife), if we hd a new message on the TiVo saying "AI is live this week. Do you want to pad the recording? Click here to do that now..."

Posted by: Martin at May 25, 2007 7:32:09 AM

My Tivo Reminded me the show was live and asked if I wanted to add an hour to the show.

My HD DVR from Verizon FIOS did not.

My wife was happy.

Erik

Posted by: Erik at May 25, 2007 12:14:03 PM

Since TiVO subscription is ostensibly for the program schedule information, shouldn't they provide the information to the device so that it can continue to record even if the scheduled hour has ended. After all a user has indicated that a specific program be recorded and not a channel be recorded during a time-period? This could be easily done if TiVO is networked, I suppose.

Posted by: Aswath at May 25, 2007 1:01:04 PM

My wife and I watched the 2-hour crapfest, delayed about an hour, so we were not able to see the results. Luckily, an hour after the show ended, I was able to find the results online. Then, I promptly bitched about it on my blog. :)

What I wonder is if they broadcast anything useful in advance to say it would run long. Sometimes you can actually see shows scheduled to record the whole 1:03 or whatever that they plan for in advance. But it seems like this was somehow a last-minute mistake, which was a fitting follow-up to the horrible performance show the day before. Yuck.

Posted by: spugbrap at May 25, 2007 1:57:27 PM

It may be to the benefit of no one when they pull stunts like this. The advertisers are no more or less affected by the crap they try to peddle, and it makes the actual programming less desireable next year. As for me and my TiVo, American Idol is being removed from my Season Pass which has sat there nicely recording all Idol events, including the advertising. My wife was pissed!

Thank God no more.

Posted by: Steve at May 25, 2007 10:13:38 PM

"But it seems like this was somehow a last-minute mistake, which was a fitting follow-up to the horrible performance show the day before. Yuck."

But it wasn't a last-minute mistake on the West coast, where the show still went well past 2 hours.

Posted by: Homer at May 30, 2007 9:01:12 PM

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