Today CNN hit us with a story about how our normal guilt about overeating at Thanksgiving is being replaced by a new guilt over not watching everything that we ask our TiVo to record. You can Google “tivo guilt” to find out how serious the problem is. Here are my solutions, both things that you can do today and ways TiVo can enhance their product, to help eliminate TiVo guilt.
First, delete some of those season passes. Yes, the new season of Heroes really does suck so stop wasting your time. You know you have season passes for shows that sounded interesting but you just never got around to them. Come on, delete them. If they’re any good they will show up in reruns.
Second, save some programs for the off season. You know it’s coming, those times of year when your TiVo sits idle because everything is a rerun? You can either take a chance and hope your chosen favorites are reaired, or simply adjust the season pass to save them forever and then ignore them until the current season ends. I wouldn’t recommend doing this with sports, news or reality shows though.
If we want to address this problem with technology then we need to look at the root cause. The media focuses on the sheer volume of recorded programs, but that is misguided. The problem is that all the programs you tell TiVo to record get equal priority on playback importance. This means that you have to make choices on what programs to watch. Making choices is not why people watch TV.
We can easily demonstrate this is the case. Most people with suggestions turned on probably allow hundreds of programs a year to be deleted without even considering them. They feel no guilt for not watching these programs. I certainly didn’t feel any guilt when I accidently deleted hours of “Dora the Explorer” and “The Wiggles”.
TiVo currently allows sorting by date and alphabetically. Alphabetical sorting makes sense, it makes it easier to find a specific program. Recording date is not a good sorting mechanism. It implies an importance to the program that was not intended by the user and may be at the foundation of the TiVo guilt phenomenon. While I will not argue for the deletion of the date ordered sort, I believe a new sort order needs to become the default, the Priority Sort.
The Priority Sort should include a number of factors combined in user selected ways so that the program the user would choose is always presented first. These are presented in no particular order.
Factor 1. Season pass priority
You already ranked the programs for importance once, this ranking should be preserved for viewing as well. Being a naturally lazy person I feel good about being able to use this data twice while only entering it once. Perhaps maybe instead you are an environmentalist, all of the bits getting used to store season pass priority can now be used for now playing priority making the Priority Sort a green technology.
Factor 2. Live Events
News and sporting events are high proirity items when new, but low priority when old. Of course that doesn’t count the “Miracle on Ice” so maybe an exception should be coded in for that one case.
Factor 3. Program and Episode Popularity
TiVo makes suggestions about programs to record, it should also make suggestions about programs to watch. You don’t want to be the only one at the water cooler to have missed the peanut butter bikinis on Big Brother because you chose to watch a Mythbuster’s clip show instead. Popularity would need to have both a predicted and measured component to account for data age and frequency of update.
Factor 4: Previously Watched
A show that you watched and did not delete is probably not the next show you want to watch. Of course tailoring the presentation of the now playing list is the main reason TiVo’s need cameras and facial recognition. Your significant other may be angry that they were told to watch Chuck ahead of the American Idol finale because you couldn’t wait to watch it, solution: tell them to get their own TiVo.
Factor 5: Previous Viewing Habits
Skipping a program in the priority ordered now playing list should be an implicit thumbs down. If you want to choose your own programs switch to date ordering. If I were the TiVo Czar and you skipped a program I would probably delete the season pass and send a letter to the network. But simply moving it down the list should suffice in most cases.
There may be other factors to consider, I will leave that as an excercize for the reader a la the Netflix Prize.
Edit: There are three sort options according to weakKnees. They are alphabetical, recording date and expiration date.
Tags: tivo guilt