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May 26, 2012

CBS wants to send you e-mails about football

by Bob Sassone, posted Jul 20th 2007 3:12PM

CBS eyeYou know how CBS Sunday football games often run long and it delays the start of 60 Minutes and Cold Case and Without A Trace and other shows that rhyme with "ace?" CBS feels your pain.

They're starting a new service called CBS Eye-Alert. You can sign up to be notified by text message or e-mail when football games are going to run long. This would supposedly help people who set their DVRs for those shows. Though I don't really see how. You can't go in and reset your DVR for another time (like you can with a VCR), can you? Or do I not understand the technical capabilities of DVRs? CBS is working with TiVo to see if the company can reprogram their customer's boxes if games run long.

No word on whether or not FOX is going to do this too.

[via TV Tattle]

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Brian

I've long thought this would be the next great innovation in the DVR world. Some sort of capability for recordings to adjust when events run long... from catching the last Oscar award at 11:19 pm or watching your post-football-show-rhyming-with-"ace." Sure, we can record 20 minutes extra, but thats inefficient. What happens if you want to record a football game that goes OT longer than 20 minutes? Face it, these are all just patchwork solutions.

I wholly welcome these dynamically updating program listings. It may even convince me up drop the standard cable company DVR for a Series 3 (4?) if Tivo gets some sort of competition-stifling patent on the idea.

Or here's another idea: Programs are assigned a code that broadcasters embed somewhere in the a/v signal. The DVR will pick this code up. It keeps recording the stream until that program id changes. These kinds of things aren't trivial to implement on a large scale, but it certainly isn't impossible.

Its a fixable problem, and I'm glad to see it moving forward. But... email alerts? Gotta start somewhere, I guess.

July 20 2007 at 5:28 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Oblivion

If I happened to be near a web browser, I could get into my MythTV box and tell it to record long. Then again, my Sunday shows are all set to record long anyway now.

July 20 2007 at 3:58 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
christy

I have a Time Warner Cable DVR and it lets me set the time to record instead of choosing a show. It also lets you set the minutes over a show's runtime you want to record.

Good service idea for CBS though...

July 20 2007 at 3:31 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply

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