recording a sports team is far far too hard

[jludman]

There should be a way to pick a sports team, and simply record all the games they play. The wishlist option for doing this is just too complicated.

In order to record UNC basketball games, I needed to make the the following wishlist:

title: college basketball , -women*
category: HD:sports:sports event
keyword: North Carolina

For a lot of sports teams, you'd have to add additional keyword exemptions, because there are a lot of universities where their name subsumes another (Miami and Miami of Ohio, for instance). I screwed this wishlist up and missed many games I wanted to watch. In the past, I used to have a lot of problems recording the Red Sox when their games were blacked out of one of the channels.

If I wanted to record these events in SD if they were not available in HD, I would need to add another wishlist just as complicated as the one above and put it in the right order.

Millions of people follow one or more sports teams. There should be a "season pass" available for teams, so that naive users can easily set this up. It is frustrating for me that I can now order a Domino's Pizza from my TiVo, but this glaring problem has been biting me since I got my first TiVo ten years ago.


In a related note, I think it would be a great boon if you could get a season pass for a show that isn't going to be on in the next 2 weeks. I understand that both of these problems would require additional state for the TiVo. And, the sports team change would require active handling of the programming data which comes from a 3rd party.

[spocko]

This is a great suggestion. I am new to Tivo, and I couldn't figure out how to create a wishlist to record a specific team until I read this suggestion. It proper search structure is not obvious.

[lrhorer]

So just open up the filter wide enough to make sure the broadcasts you want will be recorded, and ignore those which get recorded you don't want to watch. Unless you make the filters way too broad, it's not as if a few extra programs sitting in the NPL is going to hurt anything. If they bother you, delete them. It only takes a moment. I'm all for advanced automation, but I'm not sure exactly what you would want that would serve the needs of TiVo users in general, or at least not impact the way they use the TiVo. Perhaps more to the point, I don't see how the filter set specified above could be considered by anyone to be "complicated". It's clear, obvious, and takes less than a minute and a half to enter into a wishlist. IMO, 90 seconds is not a great deal of time invested to enable your TiVo to record over a dozen games every season. You only enter the wishlist once, after all.

As far as making a change to the way Season Passes are assigned, your suggestion would require a complete re-design of the way Season Passes work at the fundamental level. I'm far from convinced it would be worth it.

[jtrain]

i've got wishlists for:
Portland Trail Blazers - NBA Basketball,
USC - college football,
Oregon Ducks - college football,
Oregon State Beavers - college football,
New England Patriots - HD - NFL Football,
Denver Broncos - HD - NFL Football,
NBA Basketball - HD

I do not turn on "auto-record" for these wishlists, except for the Broncos (when in season), but this wishlist also picks up replays of Broncos games on NFL Network, etc., which are nice because of the game being condensed.

I go into the wishlist and set the games I want to record, based on if I have anything else recording that night, etc. I can go into the PTB wishlist and see all of the upcoming games (SD and HD), and choose the ones I want to record (and know I'll actually go back and watch).

Even during the Olympics, I was able to set a wishlist for USA Men's Basketball - HD (it would record a whole block of men's games (6-8 hours worth), but I never missed a game.

It's just about figuring out how to use the wishlist and make it work for you and how you want to view games. It's different for everyone's viewing needs but it is possible to do. :)

[holmete]

I was thinking the same as well... I suggested a while ago the need for a wishlist section in the forum. It would save a lot of time and effort figuring out what works and might ease the pain of missing features. There are a lot of people basically reinventing the wheel try to program there Tivo.