Just curious - I was checking out NBC’s website to see if there were any new episodes coming up tonight, and I noticed that Will & Grce starts at 8:32 pm and a special about Princess Diana starts at 9:59 pm.
My question is - why?
S.
Mostly due to the growth of PVR’s, like TiVo. By changing the start times for shows, these devices will cut off the first or last few minutes of a show. Eventually, people learn to not rely on their PVR’s for these shows, and watch them live. Which means they can’t use the 30-second-skip feature to gloss over the commercials.
And yes, it IS as obnoxious as it sounds.
I can’t find a cite, but I know I just read in the past week or so about the phenomenon (I want to say in the Washington Post’s Sunday Magazine). And the reason (apart from the screwing over tivo’ers) is advertising. If they say “Friends” starts at 7:58 and is an “extra special” long episode lasting until 9:20, they can charge the “Friends” advertising rates for the additional commercial breaks. That can be hundreds of thousands of dollars difference from the “stinker” show afterward. Plus, if a show ends at 5 past the hour, a viewer is far more likely to just stick around for the entirety of the stinker show after instead of switching to another channel for something they want to watch (minus the first five minutes of exposition).
Most shows that overlap into the next time slot are to get you miss the beginning of other shows in the next time slot and stay on that channel and watch the following show. So, it’s Friends, which is drawing a huge audience for it’s end of run that’s 32 minutes long in order to make Will and Grace even more popular.
However, it’s the shows that start a few minutes early which are specially timed to screw the DVR users.
Peace.
…until I look really hard.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A33755-2004Mar5.html.
You may need to go through the free online registering rigamarole even with this link.
Yeah! And what’s up with songs that aren’t 3 minutes long?! Huh? Don’t they know that you’re required by law to make everything the same duration as everything else in the genre?
My ignorance is showing, but I thought one of the features of TiVo was supposed to be that it “knows” when the shows are coming on? If I can look at the listings and see that a show starts at one minute before the hour, can’t TiVo?
Julie
They shortchange one of my favorite shows, Scrubs, with this crap almost every week. It ends up starting at 8:34 or something, instead of 8:30. I hate tuning in on time and seeing the tail end of another lame Friends episode. :mad:
NBC seems TiVo-friendly… the recorded shows have a network icon on the Now Playing screen (haven’t seen those for many other channels), and they have “thumbs up to record” commercials. I don’t think this is a ploy to get people to stop using DVRs.
However, by making their shows overlap with shows on other channels (even by just one minute), they can force people to choose between their show and the following/preceding show on another channel. If you set a season pass for Will & Grace, which ends at 8:32, then you can’t also set a season pass for a show on a different channel starting at 8:30.
The sticking point with Tivos is that say if you want to record a show from 8-9 and then another from 9-10, well you can’t record that one that starts at 9 if NBC claims it begins at 8:59. But I just record by time and channel when this happens. My mom’s gotta have CSI and ER both, you know.
-Lil
Let’s take the case of Friends which NBC has scheduled to be 32 minutes long (8:00 - 8:32 PM).
TiVo doesn’t have a problem with this since NBC is publishing that the show is 32 minutes long, and so, TiVo will record NBC from 8 to 8:32.
Now, let’s say that NBC didn’t publish the fact that Friends goes ‘two minutes long’ each night. TiVo can handle that. I can tell TiVo to record an extra two minutes. This feature tells TiVo “stop recording x minutes late.” This feature is mostly intended for sporting events that can run long, or to deal with TV channels which regularly do not start their shows exactly on time (Nickelodeon is infamous for this). TiVo also has a feature which allows one to start a minute or two earlier than the published time, “start recording x minutes early.”
Now, let’s say that not only am I a fan of Friends, but I don’t like Will and Grace and so, I’d rather watch the Powerpuff Girls at 8:30 PM.
But Friends and Powerpuff overlap by two minutes. So, here’s my dilemma, do I skip the last two minutes of Friends or the first two minutes of Powerpuff? TiVo won’t let me record both because they overlap. TiVo doesn’t have a ‘stop recording x minutes early,’ nor does it have a ‘start recording x minutes late.’
And so, for the sake of this example, let’s say Powerpuff is my true love because it’s much more intelligent than Friends (which it is). And so, I’ll tell TiVo to record Powerpuff (and it will look it up in its internal guide and record Cartoon Network from 8:30 to 9:00 PM). And then, I’ll tell TiVo to record NBC on Thursdays from 8 to 8:30 PM manually so that it will catch Friends sans the last two minutes.
Peace.
Well us lucky folks in Canada usually miss the first minute or so of TV shows thanks to “sim-subbing”.
Can-Con and the CRTC sucks!
MtM
Watchoo talkin’ bout Willis? Because the Canadian signal overrides the signal coming from the southern empire, the worst that happens is a show that starts at 7:59 starts again at 8:00. You never lose the beginning of a show, nor the end.