The time had come to upgrade to a high-definition cable box/DVR, so yesterday afternoon the well-meaning folk at my cable company sent a guy over to do the swap for me. I was so busy admiring the shiny new piece of equipment atop my TV that I didn’t bother hitting "List" button until he left, and that’s when it struck me. I saw — nothing. A big mess of blue where my roster of saved shows should’ve been. Everything I had recorded over the last few months was gone. Oh, the horror of it all. To quote my colleague Michael Slezak (who recently suffered his own cable-company indignity), "They figured out how to replace the human heart – why can’t they figure out how to transfer the contents of your cable box?"
What makes this so much worse than it should be is that I rarely watch shows when they air. Much like Annie Barrett is part of the slow movie movement, I am part of the slow TV movement. This also makes me a gorge-watcher: I wait until a rainy weekend, and watch 10+ hours in one sitting to catch up. Things that I lost in the trade: a half-dozen Wire episodes from season 5, four eps from season 4 of Lost (I’m not proud), all eight eps of the PBS doc The Great War, the first ep of Project Runway’s fifth season, (and, erm, a half dozen from season four), two eps of Burn Notice, plus a severe Daily Show and Colbert backlog… oh, I can’t go on. I thought writing this would be cathartic, but I just feel like I’ve been kicked in the solar plexus.
Have you ever lost your cable box, or an entire season of a show, and (temporarily) lost your mind? (And I know a lot of shows can be streamed online, but whatevs, it’s just not the same thing!)
Share my pain — and your own stories — below.
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My DVR broke on the Thursday that all or most of my shows were to return from the strike. I had all of the December pre-strike “finales” of my favorite shows stored on there, all of the new episodes of Lost (my favorite!), and quite a few movies I hadn’t gotten around to watching. After an hour on the phone with the satellite company (they told me “this sometimes happens with DVRs” (it wasn’t even a year old!!)), they said they’d ship a new one out for free, plus $24.99 shipping. I figured FedEx — it would get there by Saturday, and I could start the long process of setting everything up again. Nope — Monday, and an additional 30-45 minutes on the phone trying to get the new one working and synched with the satellites. (Thanks to the miracle of TV on the internet, I was able to catch up all of Thursdays shows that I missed on Friday.) There should be some kind of “flash drive” option where we could record what’s on the old one and transfer it to the new one.
I lost season 3 of The Office I had taped while I was studying abroad. I freaked out.
This almost happened to me too last summer. Fortunately the girl from Time Warner reminded me to watch everything before turning in my old box when we switched to the HDDVR. Otherwise I would have lost Burn Notice season 1.
My DVR randomly broke a few weeks ago, so it had to be replaced. Upon replacement, I discovered that not only had I lost the current shows I watch, but also about 20 episodes of 90210 that I had recorded and planned to watch someday. Now I’m so disheartened, I can’t even bring myself to continue recording the show.
there’s this signal check thing that cablevision does at around 1am or 2am–which i’m assuming they do because they think no one is awake–and it cuts out the sound of the program you’re watching for almost an entire 60 seconds. i forgot what movie or series it was, but at a really important part, the sound just cut out, and i missed the whole sappy scene. son of a…
I had the entire first season of Psych, the last episode of Gilmore Girls, season 2 of Battlestar Galactica, and all my favorite Angel episodes erased recently. It is uber painful for me to delete anything off my dvr. Every time I’m about to, I take about 20 minutes to think of all the reasons why I don’t need to watch whatever I was watching again, but in the end I always keep it anyway.
I too had a return from strike Lost situation, and ever since then I’ve just hated DirecTv more and more. Don’t EVEN get me started on how they dropped TiVo support and now replace machines with their HIGHLY inferior product. But lately that thing has gone on the fritz; it still works, but it will do things like shut down from time to time, and it’s usual crappy features that TiVo did so much better (i.e. getting to the end of a show, if you fast forward too far, it demands you keep or delete it, and you have to start ALL over from the beginning to try and catch that last minute). Alright, I said I wouldn’t get into it, so I’ll stop. My point being it’s acting up, but I just won’t get it replaced because I’ll loose everything. So before the new season, I’m switching to Fios or something, but BEFORE, so I don’t build a backlog and get screwed again by DirecTv. F**k you DirecTv, F**k you. Learn how to create usable products before you force people to change. Once more, F**k you!
Last winter the boiler in my apartment building exploded, leaving us without power for the weekend and heat for a week. I sought refuge in my boyfriends apartment for the duration, but came back horrified to see that the long power outage had destroyed all the contents of my dvr. Its been so long that I don’t remember any specifics of what I lost, but I was quite devistated.
Actually, most DVRs these days do have a USB port on the back. We keep the non-essential shows on the DVR itself but if it’s anything we want to save, we have an external USB drive plugged in (500GB so it holds plenty).
I had the entire fourth season of LOST on my dvr when cable came to replace it. I was all psyched to spend the 9 month hiatus rewatching episodes and figuring stuff out, and now… sigh…. i’ll have to wait for the dvd. Damn cable. Damn them.
Why would your information be saved? The data is stored on a hard drive inside the box. If you get a new box, you’re getting a new hard drive. That’s like getting a new computer, and all of your info/data is “magically” transferred onto the new computer.
My DVR died on me last Friday, and I had to get a new one. I scrolled through some things I saved (it was 85% full). It was hard to delete them, but it wouldn’t play, so I had to. I have a DVD recorder, so I normally transfer all the important things. I wish I would have done it on Wednesday before it broke. I knew I’d be losing all my recorded programs by getting a new one. Technology can be unyielding sometimes.
This is why you get an external hard drive to hook up to your DVR – Mr. Kitty lost all his Mythbusters before he learned his lesson.
This has probably been said already – but it also stinks when you have to redo all your season passes!!! I also don’t watch shows live, so I don’t even know when they all air live. Hard to set them all back up and remember what you had…
I bought a DVD recorder in order to fix this problem. I have so many movies on my DVR that I’m holding on to as if I owned the DVD. When I last switched my box, I got the DVD recorder so I could record each movie on to a disk and permanently keep it. However, I wasn’t able to figure out how to make the recorded work in time so I lost a dozen movies from my old DVR. I was able to recapture some of them but some have yet to be repeated. Sigh.
I moved to a new apartment where cable is included, but it’s regular, DVR-free cable. Which is nice, because it doesn’t cost extra, but it sucks that I have to actually remember what time The Soup comes on.
When I moved a couple of years ago, I had to unhook my faithful TIVO and didn’t think anything would be there when I hooked it up again. Imagine my surprise when every show was still in my play list. Accept No Substitutes! (especially that Time Warner piece of $%#% DVR)!
My faithful TiVo is starting to get a little wacky after years of faithful service. I live in Chicago, and so I rarely get to watch my beloved St. Louis Cardinals baseball on TV. The one time the Cards were broadcast nationally so I could watch, TiVo recorded exactly 2 minutes of the game — and then froze. It didn’t start working again until the game was over. Sigh…
Several years ago, PBS showed Light in the Piazza on Live from Lincoln Center. The show was beautiful and perfect. We DVR’d it and had it for about a year, until the DVR had had enough and deleted it for no apparent reason. Making it doubly sad is that now the show has closed and there will not be a DVD of this amazing performance. Boo!
This is why I have a LG combo DVD/HDD unit, so I record to the internal HDD then if I want to keep it I put it on DVD. Pity TiVO and other PVRs don’t have an easy way to do this.
I lost the series finale of Everwood due to a move and changing cable companies. I’m still sad about that one
My DVR started having problems yesterday and there are many shows I NEED to watch. Hopefully it will come back. Please keep me in your prayers.
Apparently from these postings last week was a bad one for DVRs. Mine died as well. I lost Planet Earth (all of it), the final three episodes of ER, the whole season of Intervention and a bunch of other random stuff. All these boxes go out in the Summer when nothing’s on? I smell a conspiracy – maybe the cable DVR box makers are in cohoots with Netflix.
The last DVR box I had that died had a really cool Kevin Smith special, in which he went to a bunch of college campuses and just talked about stuff. That was a real loss.
I honestly couldn’t tell you what exactly I lost, but when my Tivo crashed last fall I cried. I literally cried. My husband came running into the living room completely baffled until he looked at the blank screen on my TV and listened to the persistent ‘bonk, bonk, bonk’ coming out of the TV as I repeatedly pressed the Tivo button on the remote that was no longer working. Now, that wonderful machine gave me four years of faithful service recording approximately 40-45 hours/week (more after I started a bad Sci-Fi movie habit on the weekends), so I think it earned an easy death, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t mourn its passing.
My husband, while thinking I was completley foolish, was just happy because it meant he got to go to Best Buy that night without me nagging about him spending too much. How can I argue about a couple of new video games when I abandon him for my ever-faithful, shiny, new, uber-Tivo every night?
The final episode of Moonlight! GAAAAAAAH!!!!!!!
We lost Season 2 of Friday Night Lights and some Planet Earths. That was a sad day indeed.
I paid my satellite company for the movie channels for the entire year in advance under a promotion. Then 3 months into the promotion they reached in and turned my movie channels off stating that if I agreed to pay them even more money, they will give them back. But I said no, and bought another access card designed to block the satellite companies theft of my movie channels. The satellite company was sued by 31 different state attorney generals and fined for theft. The satellite comp[any then turned on subscribers and sued them in federal court for having tried to stop there theft of movie channels for having bought an access card. They lied to the court stating that subscribers never paid for service and said nothing of there previous theft of movie channels. They tried to paint subscribers as the thief even though the satellite company was fined 11 million from the theft. Then the satellite company forced a confidential settlement leveraging the high cost of litigation.
My DVR box has a USB port on the front – I would think you would be able to do something to download off, but my cable (Time Warner) says no.
I think they are lying. This is 2008 – you should be able to transfer off onto a cd or a harddrive without getting involved in a cd recorder.
I know ours will freeze up again, soon. And when that happens, I’m not telling my wife that her Days of our Lives and Barry Manilow appearances are gone.
FINALLY.. I can express the pain I have been feeling for SO long.. I moved eight months ago and had to cancel my DirecTv subscription and switch to the vastly inferior and cumbersome Time Warner Cable DVR.. I lost the ENTIRE last season of LOST, the ENTIRE last season of HEROES and first season of Burn Notice and lots of other things. This DVR is the worst. The method of programming a show is horrible. I still have trouble with the remote and HATE having to fast forward through the entire show to catch the last minute again. Even my technologically inept husband managed to figure out the TiVo remote.. It’s all we can do to program a series now on this crappy DVR. Even though I’ve programmed it to record new episodes, it still insists on taping repeat episodes, which of course get stored and causes other shows to be erased (i.e. LOST). I miss the bleeps of my TIVO. Bleeping Time Warner Cable..
I thought my cable went out during the Sopranos finale. Thankfully it was just that brilliant ending, but it took me awhile to figure it out.
I recently lost everything on my DirecTV Tivo. I still don’t know why exactly. The worst thing is that I had a broadcast of our local news saved because they showed a picture of my beloved dog. She passed away in February and that broadcast is lost forever. With that said, I do love my DirecTV tivo, and will cancel DirecTv before they ever force me to use one of their new DVR’s.