Is CBS Blocking Survivor From Your DVR?
John Sciacca at Sound & Vision says his DVR no longer lets him record his favourite show, Survivor. Sciacca claims that despite setting his Time Warner box to record every episode of the reality show, when the time comes, it acts as if there is nothing to record. Sometimes, he says, the record light even goes on during the show, but it isn’t saved to the hard drive. Apparently he’s not the only one stuck without Survivor.
Following Sciacca’s advice, I ran a Google search for “‘Survivor’ ‘dvr’ ‘didn’t record’“, and found several message board posts detailing similar problems. The issue is present in other DVR types as well, including DirecTV and standalone TiVo. However, some other users say that they haven’t experienced any problems with their time-shifted Survivor eps at all. To make sure this problem was confined to Survivor, I checked other popular shows like Lost and American Idol, and came up empty-handed.
We’ve put in a call to CBS to explain this paranormal activity, and the folks there are looking into the problem. Sciacca suggests that this may be a case of altering show metadata to instruct DVRs to stop recording—in the past, networks have been known to alter their programming to stop DVR users from getting content (and skipping ads)—but we will reserve judgment until we hear more. In the meantime, if you’ve been experiencing similar problems, please share. [Sound & Vision]
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Comments (AU Comments | US Comments)
I doubt they are doing anything intentionally. They changed the encoding on Survivor about 6-8 weeks ago; probably to get higher quality in less bandwidth. If you are using a PC based decoder this means that the decoder needs more CPU to decode, but if you are using a PVR like a TiVo or other black box they simply can’t cope because they don’t have the additional resources to toss into the mix.
From what I can determine they are within spec, and it’s just a matter of patching the decoders so they can handle this efficiently.
I experience this from time to time. The most recent case is CBS Big Brother 9. The program title changed half way through and the Directv Tivo seemed to cope but really didn’t. I check ahead and do manual recordings.
[Incidentally, the Survivor season has been recording just fine with a season pass.]
Another case was 2007 winter season of Monk on USA. A season pass would never set up a recording, so I did it manually. I have had other cases that go the reverse way, where a season pass would pick up a zillion recordings.
But 99% of the time in works fine. I figure it is some interaction between the Tivo software and the metadata creates a condition where the recording is skipped. It is the consumer responsibility to fix those things.
Some networks are just terrible about metadata. Try figuring out an ESPN 2007 World Series of Poker – the descriptions are always the same and there is never a date. The only way out of that was a manual timed recording for a certain channel, certain time and day of the week.
I blame incompetence instead of an evil plot.