One of the things that I’ve noticed about TiVo is that if you want to record a sporting event, it takes a pretty serious commitment. Whether it’s the four hours that many games can stretch into or the extra hour to an hour and a half you need to pad for overtime, sporting events take up a big chunk of your PVR space. Early on, TiVo recognized the importance of letting sports fans pad for overtime, but they never gave you the option of telling it to start recording a program later. The reason why I’d like to see this functionality is that I love sports, but only have a limited amount of time to spend watching them. With two tuners and HDTV storage issues, Sunday football has turned into an intense challenge to see all of the games before running out of storage capacity or before passing out from too much consumption of beer 
While I love football, with six to seven games a week going 3 – 4 hours a piece (not counting DirecTV subscribers), I simply don’t have the time or storage capabilities to see every game, yet each season I want to see as many teams play as possible. In some ways this is a good problem to have, but I hate having to choose each week and if I happen to need to take a day or two off from TV, it’s easy to blow through my other previously saved programming in an attempt to record each game.
If TiVo could create a setting for sports fans like myself who really only want to catch the very end of each game, it would be a welcome improvement to their software. This would be especially helpful during the baseball season when teams play an greedy insane number of games. In the past I’ve set my TiVo Wishlists to record just one Giant’s game at a time and have then skipped to the last three innings. If it’s a close game, I watch it and enjoy the tension that a good contest brings, but if it’s a blowout, I fast forward to the end, check out the highlights and know that I didn’t miss much, but with this feature I could record the last four Giants games and catch up on the results at my own leisure with the same storage capacity that it takes to record one game.
Now I’ve run this idea by some of my sports friends and they think it’s a terrible idea because they seem to feel that I’m “corrupting” the natural beauty of a game by not being die hard and watching it from start to finish. I really see it another way. By being able to effectively tell TiVo that I only want it to record the last 30 minutes of a game (and of course the extra 30 – 60 minute buffer), I’m able to watch more games and see more of the players in a more crucial setting then what the 1st half of a game provides. It may not respect the purity of the game, but if I really care about a team, I’ll take the time to watch the whole thing, but on the other hand, if I have the option to record only the fourth quarter of basketball games, I might actually watch more teams then just the Lakers (Go Lakers!) In the past, I’ve resorted to recording the whole game at basic quality and have then fast forwarded to the end, but with the series 3 coming out and with HDTV changing the experience of sports, I think that this would be a really beneficial feature for TiVo users to have access to. By letting me only record just the last hour, I can in effect watch four games (albeit abbreviated ones) in the same time that it takes me to watch one game now. With the start of the football season, I’m begging you TiVo, please add this feature, my liver will thank you.
#1 by Dave Zatz on August 29, 2006 - 11:25 am
I don’t care if you only watch the last quarter of a game, but the game itself can only be watched live. You can pause a game for a restroom break or use instant replay to rewatch an exceptional play (or prove the ref wrong). But the game must be watched in progress.
#2 by K T Cat on August 29, 2006 - 12:58 pm
Davis,
Cool idea! You can do this right now, just not automatically. Use the record manually feature and record starting 2 hours into the event and ending 30 minutes after the scheduled end time. It will save you 2 hours of hard drive space on your TiVo.
#3 by davis on August 29, 2006 - 1:31 pm
Thanks KT Cat, I was hoping that there was a way to customize this for season passes and for wishlists. I never really thought to try and manually trick it into doing it. I think it would especially be useful during the regular season. During playoffs, I’ll take my chances with liver poisioning.
#4 by davis on August 29, 2006 - 1:33 pm
Dave that is too hardcore for me. I time shift everything and then avoid the internet so that I don’t get surprised. The marketing dollars can shift to live sports, but they won’t catch me in that commercial trapped. Besides baseball is soooooo slow. If you fast foward the ten minutes in between each pitch the game actually gets exciting.
#5 by basil on August 29, 2006 - 1:52 pm
If they could ever get proper data fed in time, it’d work and it’d be the Next Big Thing.
However, yesterday, I had the hardest time scheduling TiVo to record the Little League World Series game. They moved it from 8:00 PM to 5:00 PM after I left for work. And using TiVo’s online scheduling feature, I couldn’t schedule it to record, since ESPN2 still had WSOP scheduled. Had I told TiVo to record that show, and if they sent an update saying it wouldn’t show, I’d have been SOL. I had to sent family member by to manuall schedule record LLWS.
They need to get the current bugs out before they can follow your suggestion.
But when they do … it’ll rock!
Oh, and shame on you for trashing baseball. I’d rather watch a 1-0 pitcher’s duel than a 120-118 basketball game any day of the week.
#6 by davis on August 29, 2006 - 9:40 pm
Updating for schedule changes has always been a problem. Even with broadband, the schedules can’t push through fast enough. I’ve always thought that TiVo could do something where people who are watching a live sporting event could somehow signal through their remote that the game was over and when they received so many signals, they could either auto extend the game for overtime or cut the extra padding time off early so the TiVo could record something different. If they could figure out a way to communicate in real time, it could save people from missing the end of a program when a game goes long. As far as trashing the pitchers duel, I can’t help it these American sports make me crave the razzle dazzle. I do appreciate a good 0-1 soccer game though.
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