Guide data is quirky for evening news programming

General Discussion
1

As a strategy for dealing with the relatively long delay from the urge to watch the news at 11pm to actually having everything turned on and tuned in, I’ve set a recording for “NBC 4 News at 11pm”. Which only matched the weekday broadcasts. So I set a second recording for “NBC 4 News at 11pm” by clicking on a missed episode in the guide for the weekend. That seemed to cover everything, until last night when I noticed that the news was not scheduled in the guide. Setting a recording for “NBC 4 News” from that guide entry covers that missing slot, but also adds a number of other news slots on KNBC (Los Angeles general area).

I know this is likely not Tablo’s fault. I’m just annoyed at this sort of data quality glitch. Especially when the actual identifier that matches the show is not evident in any text shown to the user, so that the only clue is the missed orange tick mark in the guide.

I’m not sure even your guide data provider can solve this, as I’d assume that naming shows is a function of each station and if they chose badly it will simply be passed along.

2

Show IDs (especially for local news) are set by the local broadcaster. Tablo uses these IDs to set recordings.

I’ll have the team check out the show IDs for the news and see if there’s anything odd going on there. We can always place a suggestion with the guide provider for improvements.

3

I noticed this initially on KNBC for the 11pm slot. KTTV (FOX) has similar quirks at 10pm, where it appears that weekday and weekend news get distinct IDs. Given their rotation of staff assignments, it may even make complete sense to the station to do this, perhaps even making the show ID track the assigned lead anchor or something.

I hardly ever recorded the news with either a TiVo or DirecTV Genie, so I don’t recall what their guide data providers did.