We have a ReplayTV. At least according to the schedule that it downloads from the mothership, Lost is scheduled to run from 8:00-9:01, and it does in fact run over.
This means that the Replay will not record the West Wing, which starts at 9:00.
Is it a deliberate ploy? The nose of the camel of staggered schedule times that will thwart DVRs?
I guess that’ll teach us to skip commercials . . .
In a word: Yep.
ABC is hoping you’ll say, “Oh well, guess I’ll watch The Bachelor.”
:pets VCR: “See boy, those new-fangled gadgets don’t compare to you…” 
Whoops, that should be : pets VCR:. :o
I was laughing about this with a buddy of mine who recently got TiVo. We both watch Lost, and I watch everything via VCR tape in the TiVo style. I hate commercials.
We also both watch the King of Queens, and it was a snap for me to program the digital cable to switch channels at 9:01. KoQ appeared to start about 10 seconds before the switch, so for me it was basically ideal. For my friend? Not so much.
But ABC is shooting themselves in the foot by rebroadcasting Lost on Saturdays. Why not just tape it then?
Your VCR can tape Lost until 9:01 and also tape The West Wing starting at 9:00?
If I wanted to, I could set up a manual record for Lost (8:00-9:01) and let The West Wing start at 9:00, or let Lost tape as normal and manually record The West Wing starting at 9:01. But I’d have to set up the recording manually instead of just double-clicking on record, and I still miss the beginning or end of one of the shows.
Curse them. Curse them, I say! shakes fist in impotent rage
Sorry, Ellis, that was meant for ArchiveGuy.
As soon as we detected their evil, evil, scheme, the first thing we checked for was other showings, but they’re not re-showing this week’s Lost. Or West Wing, either. Bastards.
Stupid shows on real networks. Why aren’t they showing every new ep three times a week like Fox and UPN?
No, but I could live without the first minute, which is usually a commercial and “Previously on The West Wing…”
(of course, this is all hypothetical, since I gave up on Bartlett & Co. last season)
I was pretty pissed that I couldn’t do this with my Tivo. It only has 5 minute granularity on prescheduled manual recordings, so I’d have to start my Mythbusters recording at 9:05 and miss 4 minutes of the beginning. So I ended up just recording it by pressing the record button. How primitive.
I tape the Mythbusters re-air at midnight. I presume the East Coast Discovery Channel feed runs it then too…
When NBC started doing this with ER, I scheduled my mom’s Tivo manually. So from 9-10 every thursday, the tivo records whatever’s on NBC, whether it’s ER or not. But that way she could get both ER and CSI(which is on from 8-9).
-Lil
ABC is doing this with several shows. One of the other ones being affected is “Desperate Housewives” on sunday nite. I got a MSG from TiVo the other day alerting me to ABC’s trickyness. Thankfully, I don’t have anything on my schedule for after Desperate Housewives so it won’t affect me…but as the others have pointed out, you’d have to do a manual recording to get around it…
I just want to say that my Dish Network DVR would have no trouble recording both Lost and West Wing. In fact I have recorded two seperate shows at the same time. The DVR allows recording through the main input and through the PIP input as well.
'Course, they’re screwing Canada too. CRTC regulations (FCC equivalent) allow Canadian broadcasters to pre-empt an American station signal with their own if they are broadcasting the same show. This has something to do with showing Canadian commercials during the show being broadcast. There’s probably a few threads about the Superbowl pre-emptions.
Around here, Lost is on the originating ABC affiliate, but at 9PM when ABC is scheduled to start ‘The Practice’, the local station broadcasting ‘The Practice’ overrides the signal and starts showing ‘The Practice’ despite the fact that Lost is still on. There is nowhere for me to find the final minute of Lost since there was no Canadian station showing it and I’ve now ‘lost’ ABC.
For those of us who watch both Lost and Smallville, the plethora of ways to time-shift TV has been a huge boon. Personally, I watch one episode live and get a digital copy of the other a few hours later, courtesy of a crafty pal with a PVR. I would bet that ABC is extending Lost because the producer (David Fury) is begging for 42 minutes of screen time, and the sales department – sensing a hit – needs to squeeze in 19 minutes of commercials.
For those of you who see commercials during Lost, how many of them are for other ABC shows, and how many are paid slots?
I don’t tivo lost anyway—we get ABC’s HD feed via Bright House Cable and since I don’t have a HD DVR, I just watch it in HD instead—but in situations such as this, I am grateful that my Bright House DVR box has double receivers. 
Are you sure they’re actually doing this to fubar digital recorders? NBC used to pull this crap all the time - extending ER and Friends and other really popular shows an extra minute or two so that the on the hour commercial break would become part of a more popular show’s block of time, and thus be something they could charge vastly more money for.
Unlike the 40-minute Friends, which actually contained 40 minutes of programming, Wednesday night’s Lost was scheduled to end at 9:03, but actually ended right on time at 9:00. So yeah, it was an evil plot.
That’s interesting, because the version I have (a TiVo’ed copy burned to VCD with the ads edited out) was 42 minutes long, without the “next week on LOST” segment. Most previous episodes have been 40 or 41 minutes, including the preview segment.
Pffft. Of course not. Dont’ you see, it’s all about me. They are out to get me. 