How do you fool a TiVo? Change the name of the show
There is a very small post over at Contact Music which brings up a very interesting point about networks renaming shows. Recently ABC decided to change the name of its flagship news program from World News Tonight to just World News. Well it seems that this caused quite a few problems with TiVo subscribers.
According to the post, TiVo users found that their units were no longer recording the show since the name change. TiVo didn’t catch the change and it appeared as if the show just stopped being broadcast. So a reminder to all of you out there: if you have a show set to record based on its name, make sure you check its status after a name change.
Technorati Tags: PVR, DVR, TiVo, ABC
Actually it isn’t the name, per se. There is a series identifier in the shows metadata that the TiVo, and other DVRs to my knowledge, use. The name can change as long as the ID does not, and the recording will keep going. But if the ID changes, even if the title doesn’t, it breaks.
This has come up before. One of the most famous is the name change with ‘Enterprise’ to ‘Star Trek: Enterprise’ (or vice-versa, whatever). They changed the name AND ID, and everyone scrambled to change their Season Passes – then they changed the ID *back*, so anyone who hadn’t changed their SP started getting it again and those who ‘fixed’ it, broke.
More recently the anime series Samurai 7, which is on IFC, had the ID change for no reason I could find. I just noticed my SP wasn’t going to record a new episode, so I recreated the SP and it started working again. The title hadn’t changed.
This kind of thing is pretty rare, however.