Masterpiece Classic on PBS

Thanks for the reminder.

I'll have to redo my season passes for the Masterpiece shows to adjust for the new Rovi way of doing guide data. I used to just delete the shows I didn't want to watch, but that won't work anymore.

I just subscribed to email notifications on the Masterpiece web site to remind when the various shows start so I can create specific season passes for the ones I want.

 

The Rovi change has screwed up even old recordings on my TiVo. I had a Masterpiece Mystery folder with the three episodes from the last series of Wallander in it. When I went into the folder, I only saw one recording. I backed out, tried again, and got the same result. After a reboot, I had a single recording for Masterpiece Mystery! that was the first episode, then a folder for Wallendar on Masterpiece with the other two.

When I complained to support about other Rovi data problems like "TBA", I just got back a canned "repeat guided setup" response.

Asshats.

The "XXXX on Masterpiece" is going to cause serious problems for those of us interested in all Masterpiece Mysteries, Classics, Contemporaries or what have you.

 

The claim is that this is the way PBS is doing it.

 

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What has worked well for us is to set up a Wishlist (old tivo) for any show with title word "Masterpiece". It is really nice to have them all collected together in a single folder (like they were in the days when the only title in use was "Masterpiece Theater", before they started fragmenting their offerings with separate titles "Contemporary", "Mystery", etc.).

Every once in a while, some other show comes along with "masterpiece" in the title, but it is not very often, and it is easy enough to delete. (Usually I filter them out before they're even recorded, by scanning the To Do List.)

 

If you want to limit it to just Mysteries, add "Mystery" as a keyword.

Another oddity in the data - for non-mysteries such as "Poldark on Masterpiece", one of the keywords is "Consumer". WTF does that mean?

 

I've been using "on masterpiece" with the new data, plus keywords to exclude the series I don't want. Has worked great so far.

 

Ugh. I haven't been getting any of this season of Indian Summers, I guess now I know why. Comcast shows it with this name change, too, so this isn't just a Rovi thing.

 

Annoying. Searching for "Indian Summers" didn't even turn up anything, I had to do the wish list search. No repeats to be found, so now I have to wait until it turns up on streaming to get the first two eps.

 

Soap opera maybe? :-D

 

Then this change has been retroactively applied to a subset of existing recordings rendering some of those recordings invisible in their folder structure and elsewhere in the My Shows listing until a reboot.

I'll stick with my "******" assessment.

This isn't just a titling issue as indicated above.

 

I know that. I had my "Masterpiece Mystery" 1P changed to "Endeavor on Masterpiece".

 

My old recordings seem unaffected. I still have a bunch of recordings from last season of Indian Summers and they are in a folder called Masterpiece Classic on my Roamio. The old 1P are "Masterpiece", which I guess must have changed to drop the Classic, and "Masterpiece Mystery!"

The air date thing seems to have been fixed, though, at least for Indian Summers. When I set up the new 1P for "Indian Summers on Masterpiece", it was originally set to new only, and it was showing that it would record last night and next week.

 

Same here. My playlist folder containing 2 Sherlocks has that title.

 

I am pretty bummed about this change. I had to manually go and delete a lot of series that I didn't want (or probably more accurately that I probably would have wanted/enjoyed, but didn't start watching at the beginning), but if not for the way it was set up before, I would have never started watching Indian Summers in the first place.

Now I will have to remember to manually go check the new "On Masterpiece" wish list that I set up periodically.

 

You can watch it on the PBS app on AppleTV, iPad, etc. (and presumably many other products, I just haven't used those other ones).. I used it last year to watch these while at the gym.. IIRC, it only had one or two ads BEFORE the show and after the show.. Still more ads than I want, but less pain than trying to make the !@$# Tivo app actually successfully download a show (which is torture since it's so broken).

 

I've actually still got 6 episodes to watch from last season, so it'll be a while before I get around to these. Hopefully they are still there.

 

They expire from the PBS app I think around a month after airing.. Though I seem to remember the PBS app giving you a way to 'subscribe' which may give you longer.

 

Has anyone tried the subscription to the app? Does it give you the back catalog of shows like what HBO does?

 

I was streaming Amazon Prime for free on Jetblue yesterday, and noticed I had Poldark in my list, which reminded me I have most PBS stuff available to me on Prime. I just checked and S1 of Indian Summers is on there, so by the time I'm ready to watch S2, I'm sure it will be up.