mardi 30 août 2016

Rovi guide data issues

There are serious issues with the data being sent to the TiVo with the guide changeover.

-Original air dates are often incorrect or missing.

-New or Repeat flag is often incorrect (or missing). One of the big TiVo benefits is that the user didn't have to deal with that. Now, based on many posts, users have to spend hours weeding out the duplicates and trying to figure out if everything we wanted actually recorded in addition to all the things we didn't want recording.

The above two items are what has made a TiVo a TiVo for more than a decade, and while there used to be very occasional glitches with them, now they are largely broken. Having tech support say we need to recreate SPs is meaningless when the box currently can't differentiate between new and rerun, which used to be a really big part of the TiVo experience - being able to rely on the device to do the correct thing.

A less serious but increasingly annoying issue is that the breathless prose describing movies, where we are subjected to someone's unsolicited opinion on the content, is pushing actual descriptions not just off the box, but making most of the actual description invisible, even if you hit 'info' on the guide (which brings up the more verbose descriptions). At first, the chatty descriptions were kind of amusing, but that phase has passed for me - now it's just annoying not being able to see actual descriptions.

And who on earth thought it was a good idea to pad descriptions further by listing the actors in the description, followed by a list of the same actors in blue type? What is the point of that?

It's likely much of this may be cleaned up (or may be left as is because it's the 'Rovi culture'). I've been a TiVo customer and cheerleader for more than a decade, but there comes a point where loyalty is overridden by frustration.

I'll just mention additionally that as part of the 'transition' they just killed Desktop Plus by refusing to allow it to link to my online account, which in turn stops the Desktop server from launching, rendering all of it useless. And yes, I know pytivo is an alternative for now. Until they decide to kill its functionality:

"the PC transfer is no longer a supported feature on our platform." --TiVo's Ira Bahr 12 days ago

"We've decided to kill a feature that's been a TiVo mainstay for many years with absolutely no warning to our customers" does not bode well for the future.


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