TiVo has new local Dish Network lineups

[Maniacal1]

Since must-carry, TiVo has had one humongous lineup for its Dish Network customers. The lineup contains every single local that Dish Network offers and causes the TiVo to operate slowly because of the size of its listings. They had to do it this way because of Dish's policy to provide "unserved" customers of local-into-local with any two cities of their choice from the distants that Dish Network offered.

Now that all customers are restricted to only 6 cities as distant locals, TiVo can and has created local lineups for each city in which it offers local networks. These lineups also contain the distant locals from the six available cities.

If you are using a standalone TiVo with Dish Network with locals, switching to the new local lineup will speed up your TiVo's processing in a very noticeable way. You can run TiVo's Guided Setup to access the new lineups. (And the full, national lineup with all locals will be going away in a couple of weeks.)

Be aware that the new lineups are not perfect. The PBS affiliates from the distant cities aren't listed yet, and the superstations are only listed at their old channel numbers (in the 230 range). These problems should be corrected before too long.

[MikeW]

Thanks for that update! It us unbearable to go through guided setup with all the channels! When I select "Remove all Channels" the majority are still selected as channels I received. If you delete them all manually, Tivo, for some reason, doesn't save the changes. You have to delete about 100 at a time, save your changes then delete more. Takes over a half hour just to tell Tivo which channels I get. This should make that task more bearable.

[andyf]

OK, so not fair. I reported this days ago here:

http://www.dbstalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=3734

and no one gave a da*n.

[kstuart]

Andy, your post was less detailed than Maniacal1's post. For example, you said that the Superstations are missing, not that they are only missing in the four-digit locals section...

[Scott Greczkowski]

I don't have a Tivo so it didnt effect me at all. :)

Thanks Andy and Maniacal1 for the information. It IS appreciated!

[andyf]

Oops! Did I miss off the smiley. :)

[Maniacal1]

Andy, sorry I didn't notice your post when I passed along the information. I should have searched harder. At least here, I wasn't sent to the corner for a week. :)

Andy and I have both been working with TiVo to resolve the lineup problems. And I appreciate his efforts.

[andyf]

Originally posted by Maniacal1
Andy, sorry I didn't notice your post when I passed along the information. I should have searched harder. At least here, I wasn't sent to the corner for a week. :)

Andy and I have both been working with TiVo to resolve the lineup problems. And I appreciate his efforts.

I really was kidding.... as long as the word gets out, it doesn't matter who gets it out.

Turns out Detroit, MI may not have local headends according to one user who re-tried Guide Setup. He/She only sees the USA or the temporary lineup. Trying to find out what's up with that.

[kstuart]

And the full, national lineup with all locals will be going away in a couple of weeks

What happens if one is still using the national lineup at that point? Do you find when you want to use your TiVo, that it says "you must rerun Guided Setup"??

[andyf]

Originally posted by kstuart


What happens if one is still using the national lineup at that point? Do you find when you want to use your TiVo, that it says "you must rerun Guided Setup"??

I'm guessing here but with information based on other posts.

It'll be like a cable headend change.

1. With 2.5 you'll lose all Season Passes.
2. With 3.0 your Season Passes will go inactive.
3. Daily calls will succeed but you'll notice your guide data look ahead get shorter and shorter until it starts nagging you, then you'll have no guide data.

No warning, no error message.

However, I'm not sure TiVo would do that, surely a PTCM to warn you in advance?

[joblo]

Ahem… reality check… there are still over 170 DMAs where E* does NOT provide locals.

Therefore, the national lineup will NOT go away any time soon.

Your local channels may disappear, resulting in missed recordings on those channels, but you certainly are not going to run out of guide data.

Assuming, of course, that the folks at Tribune/Replay/Tivo handle things intelligently… ;)

[andyf]

Originally posted by joblo
Ahem… reality check… there are still over 170 DMAs where E* does NOT provide locals.

Therefore, the national lineup will NOT go away any time soon.

Your local channels may disappear, resulting in missed recordings on those channels, but you certainly are not going to run out of guide data.

Assuming, of course, that the folks at Tribune/Replay/Tivo handle things intelligently… ;)

It's already been stated by TiVo that the National Dish lineup will be going away in the next 30 days.

When we talk about the National lineup, we talk from a Dish perspective. If they don't provide locals in 170 DMAs that's irrelavent. We're talking about providing a lineup for all the channels Dish does provide access to.

[joblo]

If, by “a lineup for all the channels Dish does provide access to”, you mean all the channels a pirate might get if he could somehow build a switch and fiber network to combine the signals from every spotbeam in the country, then yes, I expect said pirate will be out of luck at some point in the not too distant future.

But if you mean the lineup that both Replay and TiVo (I have both, btw) identify as “National”, that lineup, from a Replay/TiVo perspective, cannot “go away” unless and until every zip code is assigned at least one “local” lineup. While I have seen some zips where TiVo provides local lineups that could only benefit those with bogus service addresses, there are still, as of this writing, other zips where only the “National” and “no locals (Temporary)” lineup are available.

Therefore, what is likely to happen is that the national lineup will be “pruned” to be the intersection of all local lineups, i.e. including national services plus local network channels from the six cities nationally available. This will be a change within the existing lineup, not “like a cable headend change”.

While it is possible that the pruned “National” lineup could be removed from those zip codes that have local lineups available, that would come under the heading of non-intelligent behavior. The obvious purpose of this change to eliminate the network costs incurred by Replay and TiVo in distributing hundreds of channels of useless listings to thousands of subscribers on a daily basis. Eliminating the “National” lineup in any given area wouldn’t further that end, and would thus unnecessarily inconvenience customers.

Please keep in mind also that since the lineups are common to Replay and TiVo, they are obviously being created and maintained by Tribune Media Services, the company that provides listings for Replay, TiVo, and Zap2it.com, so statements “by TiVo” about lineup changes are not necessarily as authoritative as you might expect.

[jwagner]

Does anyone have an update on this?

I have the AT150, Detroit locals, superstations and East/West nets (via an RV exemption).

I have not yet re-run setup based on the comments I saw here and in the TiVo Community forum regarding the Detroit headend and the Superstaions package in the 8xxx's not in the lineup yet.

So far, I still have plenty of guide data...

[MikeW]

I just redid Guided Setup this weekend. What a waste of time! The only additional city listed was Denver. Currently, with Dish on a SA Tivo, you get either w/o locals, national, Salt Lake or Denver. I was extremely disappointed. I have Dallas/Denver & Supers. Had to leave it w/National to get my chans. For now, if it works, don't do anything until TIVO sends you a message.

[andyf]

Originally posted by MikeW
I just redid Guided Setup this weekend. What a waste of time! The only additional city listed was Denver. Currently, with Dish on a SA Tivo, you get either w/o locals, national, Salt Lake or Denver. I was extremely disappointed. I have Dallas/Denver & Supers. Had to leave it w/National to get my chans. For now, if it works, don't do anything until TIVO sends you a message.

Do you get all the Dallas locals or just the big four networks.

[MikeW]

I chose the National Lineup because I didn't want to go through the entire process again if the few options available did not include the stations I receive. I only saw SLC & DEN as well as National or "No Locals".

Now that I think about your question...are you asking do I receive more with the Dish??? Yes, I am. I get the Big Four, PBS, UPN, WB, and one independant (KDFI). I've also repointed my dish, temporarily, and picked up the other stations sitting at 148. With Denver, I am not getting UPN, already had WB (KWGN on Supers), but do get PBS.

[andyf]

Originally posted by MikeW
I chose the National Lineup because I didn't want to go through the entire process again if the few options available did not include the stations I receive. I only saw SLC & DEN as well as National or "No Locals".

Now that I think about your question...are you asking do I receive more with the Dish??? Yes, I am. I get the Big Four, PBS, UPN, WB, and one independant (KDFI). I've also repointed my dish, temporarily, and picked up the other stations sitting at 148. With Denver, I am not getting UPN, already had WB (KWGN on Supers), but do get PBS.

Oh! The reason I asked was because the local Dish headends are only designed to offer locals based on the zip code you entered. This is so you don't have unneccessary channels in your lineup. Each local headend also contains the big 4 networks for all the possible 6 distant nets. The Superstations are also there on their 3 digit channel numbers. Working on getting the 4 digit channels added.

You seem to get more channels so this doesn't work in your case.

However the local headends do speed TiVos processing and gets around the too many channels bug.

[MikeW]

Do you, or a friend work for TIVO?

[andyf]

Originally posted by MikeW
Do you, or a friend work for TIVO?

No. EMail contact only. But I'm flying out to the TiVo picnic on the 15th. Hoping to meet a whole bunch of people I only know through EMail.

[andyf]

Dead thread, I know, but the update is that the Superstation channels in the 8000 range were added to my local lineup today!

[Maniacal1]

Thanks for the heads up, Andy! They're in my lineup now, too.

Now all we need is for them to add the distant cities' PBS's and we're all set (until the new receiver software puts the channels in the single- and double-digit numbers.)

[andyf]

At the TiVo picnic I had a chance to talk to Marcel from TiVo. He's the guy responsible for the lineups and guide data. We talked about the Dish lineups. The problem is that Dish doesn't really talk very well with Tribune as far as their lineups are concerned. I tried to convinve him that some Dish people had some weird deals out there that got them channels from all over and that the National lineup needed to be avaiable for some Dish customers.

The goal at TiVo is of course to reduce costs and the daily phone call to get data for the National lineup is quite expensive and most peple don't need data for a bazillion channels all over the country. Just having it as a lineup choice during Guided Setup has people selecting it even though they don't need it.

Marcel said they're going to keep it available for a while while they figure this out and yes, they're working with Tribune right now over the new local channel numbers at 2, 4, 7 etc.

[Maniacal1]

Andy, by any chance, did Marcel say anything about adding the distant PBS's? I wrote him an e-mail the middle of last week about it and haven't gotten a response.

[andyf]

The TiVo folks were fairly close mouthed when it came to specifics. Someone mentioned they'd had a meeting the day before to warn them not to say anything.

So the discussion was more general in nature but I'll tell you that Marcel seemed as confused as I am over all the different channel packaging you guys get. He pretty much goes by what Tribune tells him, they were the ones that told him all grandfathering rules were out the window.

Maybe there's a path into Tribune somewhere where your PBS station requests could be duplicated.