u/SessionIndependent17

--this is for a VMS4100ATV-E760--

I've had a 'Series' recording for "BBC News America" on WLIW (one of the metro NYC PBS affiliates) since February. It looks like the guide information has changed to change/break two things:

(1) Changed the program name [in the guide] to "BBC World News America"*

(2) Revised the program data so it is no longer recognized as a "Series" by the Fios DVR**

Because of (2), customers are left with no ability to record the normal timeslot (530pm) every day, but instead can only manually set individual "episodes" for recording. The "Series Info" button is no longer available for this program (on any channel, not just on WLIW) to be able to select it for Series recording.

More fundamentally, though, the DVR itself has no capability to say "Record Channel 21 every day at 530pm". This is literally the second most rudimentary feature of a DVR.

It's readily apparent that Fios doesn't Dog Food its own products, or its data services. I can't believe any customers pay for the Provider-supplied DVR services, as unreliable as they have proven to be in my intermittent experience over the last few months. Each offering is more awful than the last. Optimum and Spectrum's offerings were even worse overall for innumerable usability reasons, but they could at least record a recurring time slot.

Is it any wonder people are deeply annoyed at the loss of ability to use TiVo because of CableCard/QAM decommissioning?

The "tech support" aspect of this post is that it is obviously incorrect that the guide data no longer treats this program as a series. The data needs to be corrected, but it's not obvious to me where such a failure should be reported.

The real fix to provide a degree of robustness in light of the likelihood of these sorts of data failures happening in the future is that the service should provide the basic ability to have a recurring recording for a regular timeslot.

* The program name assigned by BBC itself to the program has never changed. If I resurrect any of the past recordings labeled "BBC News America" from the trash, their bumper within the program calls itself "BBC World News America", as it has for decades. I'm sure if I were using the TiVo guide, still, it would have had the correct program name.

** the loss of treatment as "Series" is only partly correct, in practice. Whatever tag is assigned to a program to allow it to be treated as a series is gone, so the recurring recording menu options are not available. But, If you go to "airings" for an individual episode, it shows each airing on different channels, and on future dates as well, in the respective timeslots. To the viewer who is just browsing, this looks like it is still treated as a Series, but in fact it is treating every airing as a rerun of the SAME single program - as if it were a film, e.g. If you view "Airings" info for a film, it will show all future available airings, but it is obviously not going to present you with Series Recording Options.