recent onepass improvements for streaming shows

I had tried creating a OnePass for a Hulu show. But as far as I can tell the My Shows list does not keep track of what episodes you have watched or what episode you are due to watch next. If I go directly into the Hulu app I can see my list and the next episode of the series is already queued and waiting for me. I'm not really sure what the advantage would be to create a OnePass for a streaming show.

 

Another feature lost. It was working for Prime.

 

Not sure I follow what you are saying. My Shows has always been self-manage. They either couldn't (or chose not to) auto delete streaming episodes after you watch them in the provider's app.

It would be nice if TiVo provided an additional My Shows list that didn't break shows out by episode. Clicking Play on the show name would just open the streaming app and let it decide what episode it should play for you.

 

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The new season of Bosch from Amazon came out last Friday (or the Friday before) and I checked it on TiVo and it wasn't available immediately. It's there now but I think one episode is missing or was earlier this week. So still needs improvement.

 

This was a feature that TiVo had working not only for streaming shows but for other upcoming broadcast/cable shows as well that you could set up 1P for shows that were not yet in the guide data. Unfortunately, it seemed to mostly stop working at some point (possibly with the Rovi metadata cutover?).

Scott

 

I'm confused -- if you make a OP as recordings & streaming episodes, it puts items for each episode in the folder... and you can delete the streaming placeholders as you watch them, just like you can with episodes of a TV show.

But I think that's only if you do "new only", if that's what you mean.

Though yeah, I totally wish Tivo would keep track of entire series, even if they're old.. so e.g. if I start a show partway in and then catch up with the old episodes, I could still delete placeholders, and eventually I would have deleted everything, so after the show stopped making new episodes, nothing would ever appear again.

 

Creating a streaming 1P does not mean it will actually work, as in you may never see new eps show up.

 

You mean because of guide data issues? It's been working reasonably well here this year for The Grand Tour on Amazon. We'll see how it does when new episodes of the Handmaid's Tale start on Hulu.

Scott

 

The main issue, I’ve had is the lag time in adding new episodes. It’s not much of an issue for shows that drop entire seasons, but for weekly shows, I’ll sometimes have the new episode watched before it ever shows up.

 

Now I'm confused. That's exactly what Tivo does, and that's how I use it. In fact, I recently switched to Roku and stopped using the Tivo apps for streaming, but I still go back to the Tivo and delete each episode after I watch it. At this point, that's the only thing I really need Tivo for--the ability to record cable TV is just a nice bonus.

 

No it is NOT.

If you make a OP as new only, it will obviously only record new episodes... so if you start after the show started, you will never get 'old' episodes.

If you make a OP as new & repeats, you will get both of course.. and after deleting the old ep, it can possibly record again ~21 days later or whatever timeout Tivos use.

I mean a way to use Tivo to record each episode only once EVER (this would require the ability to delete a show and mark it as 'not watched', if it was an accidental preemption or something -- which doesn't exist).

 

Here are OnePasses/Bookmarks I've tried to create in the past 5-6 weeks. I update every Monday and check any one that has had an issue in the past couple of months to see if it is corrected. So this is most recent status as of May 6:



As a summary: 2 complete successes out of 13, or a 15.4% complete success rate. If I'm generous and say anything I can create a OnePass/Bookmark qualifies as a partial success, then it is 9 of 13 = 69.2%. That's a little above average of the past year, but still well below acceptable.

Metadata is by far TiVO's biggest issue, and the categories are:

• Program available in TiVO database at all and shows up in search <-- By far the easiest to overcome as all programs should be available, period. Free, searchable databases on the internet can do this.
  
• Program is a single entry (IE, the same show only shows up once, which some shows show up multiple times and you have to navigate between multiple folders to get all episodes)
• Program can have a OnePass/Bookmark created. For some reason, some programs do not have the option at all. It has not happened in a while for newly added programs, but in older ones it is still there.
• Program is available on a particular service. Linking from just being a OnePasses to knowing what OTT service(s) it is on is probably the most complicated part of the matching process to keep up, but a lot of free services online seem to handle it very well.
• All episodes available on the service. This is one of the worst parts where you get the OnePass but it it is missing random episodes that are available now and you have to remember to watch it on the service directly, taking away the point of a OnePass. I've had an episode show up years later during a correction. One just happened yesterday for a show I finished two years ago!
• Episodes in correct order. Episodes are often mislabeled for season/episode or are missing that information entirely and only have a date. One of my favorites is a show where each episode has a name like "Episode 3" and they are still wrong!
• New Episodes show up in a timely manner. This is what many are talking about where something becomes available and there is a gap when or even if it shows up on OnePass.

As TiVO is selling their metadata and guide services to other companies now, the fact that someone is paying for a product with a 30+% failure rate is opening TiVO up for litigation much more than we as consumers could ever muster. If I am RCN, I would take a look at this and start pushing the issue now before your customers start blaming you for what is definitely TiVO's fault.

 

@babsonnexus We former WMC users tried to warn you about this well before the Rovi takeover 3 years ago. But nobody listened then ("pure speculation" they called it), and nothing has changed 3 years later. We have EXACTLY the same issues. This is as good as it gets with Rovi. I can't put into words how bad Rovi is at what they do.
Rovi is already killing TiVo

 

I understand the frustration and feel it--every time the Rovi data is incomplete or wrong and affects my entertainment life--but am not yet at the level of "Rovi is killing TiVo." I just wish that Rovi/TiVo would do what it contractually agreed to do.

 

You originally said:

That's the way Tivo works today, and it works for old episodes as well as new ones. If you create a OnePass starting from Season 1, and you delete the placeholder for the first episode after you watched it, that placeholder will stay deleted forever. (In the beginning there were occasionally glitches that caused them all to come back, but that hasn't happened to me for a while.) Even if Tivo records the episode again for some reason, the placeholder will stay deleted, although you won't be able to see that until you delete the recording.

Now it sounds like you're saying that in addition to deleting the streaming placeholder, you also want it to block new recordings of that particular episode after you've deleted the placeholder. I agree that that would be nice, but it doesn't bother me much. If you're watching the old episodes on streaming, you could just set it to show all streaming episodes but only record new episodes. If you want both streaming placeholders and recordings, you can change the starting season as you work your way through it, so if you're on season 3 it won't record anything from seasons 1 or 2.

I've been using OnePasses this way ever since they were introduced, and I've literally never seen it re-record an episode that I've already watched (except when the guide data is wrong and it thinks it's a new episode, which happens pretty often, unfortunately.)

 

Unfortunately that bug is still there. Just happened to me recently with "Justified" streaming only bookmark on Amazon Prime. I was somewhere in the middle of season 3 and had deleted all episodes that I'd watched. Worked fine for a month or so and then everything got reset one day - all episodes I had deleted came back again. So the bug is still there. That plus sometimes it takes months for episodes to show up for new seasons, so it makes the TiVo integration next to useless for anything recent.

 

Yes, that's exactly what I said:
so after the show stopped making new episodes, nothing would ever appear again.

 

and yeah, I'm 99% sure I've had the streaming items "come back" too recently, but I don't remember which show it was.