DVR Feature I'm Waiting For

Michael Gartenberg | May 15, 2007, 10:02 PM

I love DVRs. I have been using one for almost a decade (and that original is still in use) and it totally changes the way you watch TV. But as good as my current TiVo Series 3 is (and i love the idea of the new search tool they showed today), it could even be better. Here's what I want.

Every so often, I decide to watch a show that I have never watched before or re-visit something from my youth. The problem is that no DVR is really optimized for me to do this, capture every episode of a series of a given season. Yes, I can schedule to record every episode of MASH for example, but that will simply capture every show broadcast on every cable station that's showing it. Likewise, I can record every episode on a given channel, but that assumes the stations is going to broadcast the episodes in order.

What I want is to be able to start recording a series and tell the DVR to record every episode of a given season and then to sort them, not on the day they were recorded on the DVR but rather, on the day they were broadcast. The guide would be smart enough to fill in episodes as they are shown, no matter when they are shown. All this info is readily available (I can even see in most DVR guides the original broadcast date but can't sort on it.)

A friend of mine told me I should patent this idea. Frankly, i'm not interested in royalties, I'm interested in some vendor implementing this and making a better product.