Open letter to Joshua Danovitz, GM/VP International TiVo

[healeydave]

No worries, Thanks Pete.

[Tcm2007]

Worth correcting a few points.

While AltEPG won't have accurate OADs, that doesn't actually matter. All that's needed to make FRO work is to record an OAD of more than 28 days ago againts an old episode. That should be perfectly possible.

I have no idea why you query if Suggestions will work. I've examined the Tribune data in detail and haven't found any hidden magic dust which makes suggestions better with Tribune sourced data.

The reason AltEPG will be better is that all those annoying errors where there was unananimity on TC about what should be done, now will be done thanks to the crowdsourced data. No more missing the final of a series because they change the title to "The Final". all those "Heads up" and Guide Data error threads will instantly result in the data being corrected.

Data for the most recorded channels never went out more than a week or so, so thst's not a significant change.

[Pete77]

While AltEPG won't have accurate OADs, that doesn't actually matter. All that's needed to make FRO work is to record an OAD of more than 28 days ago againts an old episode. That should be perfectly possible.

That's surely not the same as how First Run Only was originally meant to work though?

I have no idea why you query if Suggestions will work. I've examined the Tribune data in detail and haven't found any hidden magic dust which makes suggestions better with Tribune sourced data.

Suggestions clearly uses two angles to find Suggested programs to record. Firstly the simple one of trying to record programs you have given the most direct thumbs up to or at least a thumbs up of some kind to. Secondly it tries to assume that you will like other series or programs that have similar genres to the programs you have thumbsed up the most. I just wasn't clear if that second level of sophistication (which I imagine is reliant on the Predicted Thumbs for user unthumbed programs that are revealed to the user in the Suggestions module of Tivoweb) was possible without the normal Tribune genre code structure being available. You would clearly be in a far better position than me to comment on that and only practical experience will tell in my case once the AltEPG is fully live.

The reason AltEPG will be better is that all those annoying errors where there was unananimity on TC about what should be done, now will be done thanks to the crowdsourced data. No more missing the final of a series because they change the title to "The Final". all those "Heads up" and Guide Data error threads will instantly result in the data being corrected.

In theory yes but in practice surely you are not going to trust any old member of the Crowd to alter the AltEPG. So much will still depend on how much time the high level volunteers running the project have available to react to the Crowd's feedback. If they react faster than Tribune's staff (which in some cases means just eventually reacting at all as Tribune seemed to completely ignore some long reported EPG faults) then the service may be better than before. However I think it would be naive to expect all database errors to always be corrected in sufficient time for them to incorporated in the daily database update cycle before the actual recording event is reached. This is only most likely to happen for much watched programs where there are a lot of crowd reports of errors early on.

Data for the most recorded channels never went out more than a week or so, so that's not a significant change.

Data for the most recorded channels ran between 7 and 14 days depending where you were in the week.

Curiously enough it is actually series on channels like CBS Action that still have episode specific listings where a series may have one or more new episodes every day where I am most interested in what is being recorded in three weeks time so that I can avoid episodes of a series I have already previously watched four months ago (so not caught by the 28 day rule) being recorded again. With the main channels where the programs are only broadcast weekly the need to delete recordings due to be made in two and a half weeks time was usually not there in the first place. Also I think you will find that spin off channels from the main terrestrial channels like More4, Five USA etc do have three weeks worth of data with Tribune and it is only the five main channels on which the networks compete so fiercely for ratings where listings are only released once a week for the following week.

[Tcm2007]

That's surely not the same as how First Run Only was originally meant to work though?

Yes, that's exactly how it was supposed to work.

In theory yes but in practice surely you are not going to trust any old member of the Crowd to alter the AltEPG. So much will still depend on how much time the high level volunteers running the project have available to react to the Crowd's feedback. If they react faster than Tribune's staff (which in some cases means just eventually reacting at all as Tribune seemed to completely ignore some long reported EPG faults) then the service may be better than before.

I don't know how it will work re: sign off, but for the most part the issue wasn't the time Tribune took, but their willingness to change things at all.