Maven Mapper's

Last night I was Tivo'd.  I was trying to TiVo, the show The Black Donnely's, but instead my Tivo was hijacked by House, effectively ram-rodding an unwanted TiVo recording onto my machine.

Now TiVo allows you to set Priority levels for shows that you want to record.  My wife had House cranked up at a level higher than I had The Black Donnely's and when Fox decided to drop a rerun from 2005 on Monday night, my stupid TiVo was literally to ignorant to figure out that Fox was duping it.

Now, I've noticed a similar trend with my TiVo recording 3 episodes of the Daily Show every week day and recording Smallville on a host of different channels from my cable line up at all hours of the day and night.

Those shows are both scheduled to come on at those times as the cabel company fills in gaps in their lineup and it does change very often.  This however felt like channel jacking and I'm pretty sure it was intentional.

House gets terrible rerun viewing percentages.  People don't like to watch House reruns like they used to like to watch Seinfeld reruns.  That's partly because the Networks were Tivo'd themselves.  TV shows don't have much of a shelf life in a Tivo market.  People can get the show they want with the Tivo, when they are getting Tivo'd, and they don't need to watch a rerun as they already have it recorded.  Plus, there are pleanty of other channels with other viewing options to compete for their attention, so why watch something they already have digitally recorded and / or that they have already seen.

But networks aren't stupid.  They now that people don't jump into their priority settings very often an they know that TiVo's aren't intelligent, so they can hijack a recording if they dump a rerun in a competing time slot every now and then.  I suspect they probably have access to some metric that shows that my Tivo, Tivo'd House and maybe incrementally they can charge more for ads during House.  What their advertisers that are paying the bill don't know is that Fox not only Tivo'd me when they tricked my Tivo into Tivoing House, but they also Tivo'd the advertiser into paying a higher rate for something that I'm only going to delete.

My TiVo is now a spam trap and the TiVo's me Off!

But wait, that's not really what happened . . .

That's just what I thought had happened.  Its completely plausible, but in actuality, Fox didn't hijack my Tivo even though they did spam it up with an old House rerun that I will delete and their poor advertiser did get Tivo'd as a result of the junk download.

What really happened is that NBC, decided that they didn't want any TiVo customers Monday night.  They temporarily pulled The Black Donelly's from the line up and swapped it with a show ineptly named Thank God You Were There, which if I didn't know better would make me think that this was a religious show and I would promptly not watch it.  Its actually some type of comedy improv show, which I would watch if it were called something like The Comedy Improv Show, hell I might even TiVo it.

NBC decided to launch the show with two episodes one of which temporarily bumped off the violent thuggish and gang like Donelly's.  House just happened to be on, but on an hour earlier.  So in my recorded show list, House showed up in the slot that was supposed to be filled with Black Donelly's, and NBC ended up walking away with nothing because Thank God I Was There (but I really wasn't there) was on.

Fox duped my TiVo and duped their Advertisers effectively Tivo'd the pair of us.  While NBC managed to hide in a corner and TiVo themselves right out of my TiVo, possibly bringing about the seventh sign of Armagedon as they might just find a way to go blind Tivo'ing themselves all by themselves without anyone else looking, and over a comedy show with a religious name no less, its got to be the work of the Anti-Christ and the Peacock is the Mark of the Beast.

Disclosure - I like House, nothing wrong with the show, but its basically Just a rehash of MacGiver mixed with Ephedra to spew out a drug addicted Doctor that can save the day with a cane, a gum wrapper and a patient that is always to blame because they have something to hide and would rather lie than save their own life.