NBC Reverts to On-The-Hour Primetime Programming
July 30th, 2005 at 12:32 pm by zack
In a move that is sure to please many PVR users, NBC recently announced plans to stop scheduling programming off the hour in an effort to increase viewership in the upcoming fall season. For the last couple of seasons, NBC has used strange scheduling (such as programs starting or ending at 9:02) in an effort to lock viewers into its prime time lineup. Unfortunately for PVR users, this scheduling caused conflicts when trying to record back to back shows on different channels. Many users reported coming home to find that a 32 minute long “Joey” (or other NBC program) had caused shows on other stations to not record due to conflicts on the tuner.
While the decision to stop this practice is only a small piece of NBC’s overall programming strategy, it has a large and positive impact on the PVR community. It will be interesting to see if other broadcasters learn from this and decide to keep there programming at regular intervals, especially as PVRs become more common in the average household. In the mean time, we can keep our fingers crossed.