Digital Home Thoughts: Network TV Timing: Not Getting All Your Shows Recorded?

"If you, like me, watch many of your programs via a TiVo or other Digital Video Recorder (DVR) device, you've been continually stymied in your efforts to catch "60 Minutes." Yesterday, for example, coverage of the Masters golf tournament went until about 7:45 here in New York, which meant that I only got to watch about a quarter of the program before it cut off. "60 Minutes," in fact, might be the most TiVo unfriendly program on the network schedule, because it often follows live sporting events, which don't have set end times. During football season, for example, it's a virtual guarantee that the show won't start at its scheduled time, which means TiVo users are often out of luck. "

I often have exactly the same problems with my Media Center 2005 machine, and quite often it's on Spike TV. Even though I have the MCE recording defaults set to record four minutes before and four minutes after a show (the maximum), I quite often miss parts of my shows. For instance, I was recording an Ultimate Fighting event on Spike TV and immediately after it was the first episode of The Ultimate Fighter. The first show ran long, and MCE stopped recording the second show about three minutes from the end, so I never got to see who won the fight until I recorded the same episode a few days later. I know that the Tivo's and MCE's of the world are slaves to the data they get, but there has to be a technological way of solving this problem.