Comcast dumps TiVo/Rovi in favor of Gracenote for metadata

But couldn't this also be good news, to spur Rovi on to improve its product to assure financial gain (assuming that quality issues were involved in the Comcast decision)?

pre-post edit: The article mentions that Comcast's decision may have been due to ongoing patent litigation filed by earlier TiVo Inc. against Comcast.

 

I now have a weekly reminder/event on my calendar for reviewing and managing the known, recurring Rovi-introduced guide issues. (i.e. Not including the extra time making sure I'm monitoring various forums and information sources for the flash schedule warnings.)

 

I just read, Nielsen now owns Gracenote. Nielson buys Rovi/TiVo?

 

Then Rovi decides they can make more money by saving costs and cuts all the people who formerly produced reliable guide data.

 

Maybe Tivo can sue itself and reach a settlement to use Gracenote data.

 

And then we have another not well managed transition to "new" guide data......

 

The most interesting thing I read in that article is that it took a team of 50 people 18 months to make the switchover. Meanwhile TiVo made the switch-over in under 6 months with a fraction of that amount of people and people wonder why they continue to have problems. Of course with the Rovi data, it's a case of garbage in, garbage out.

 

It seems to me that dealing with the Rovi Guide issue really doesn't require brain science. Just intelligence, involving quality control, thoroughness of entries/descriptions, and likely increased staffing to make it happen.

 

Unfortunately attention to detail and rigour is not something most people have.

 

It would help a lot if they just disabled cut & paste on the computers the rovi data entry folks are using. Maybe then every description wouldn't start with the same information free run-on sentence about the "thrilling adventure" or "heartwarming romantic comedy" or whichever sentence they cut & paste because they are probably getting paid by the word . Lately I've even noticed descriptions that include a list of all the actors in the description itself even though there is already completely separate metadata fields for listing actors.

 

This is my Rovi beef. You don't get a decent show description because of all that bloviating. Gracenote went straight to the description.

 

Exactly. The descriptions sound like they were just copy & pasted from the press release issued by the movie's/show's PR flack.

 

Wait, are you suggesting that Jack and Jill isn't really an "uproarious comedy"?

 

Sometimes it's not even the correct movie.

TCM is showing Countdown(1967) with James Caan and Robert Duvall tomorrow at 1545. What TiVo has is Countdown(1968) "Feature version of Lassie episodes..."

 

Bloviating! That is the perfect description of how the show descriptions are now. There are like three lines available and, more often than not, they are all used for bloviations. Sometimes there is room for one or two more words and that's it.

Or, my other favorite - they put the names of the stars, or guest stars in the description part, EVEN THOUGH they are already listed below! Seriously! (sorry for yelling) That is annoying. Just weird - the whole thing is weird. I wish I had never heard of Rovi. I hadn't until this happened in Tivo-land.

 

Comcast did this because of an ongoing lawsuit between what was Rovi over use of patents, not because of the quality (or lack of quality) of the metadata.