Carl Jonard Technically Still Has a Blog

There’s a nice profile of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart at The New York Times, which includes this tidbit:

The day begins with a morning meeting where material harvested from 15 TiVos and even more newspapers, magazines and Web sites is reviewed.

A former researcher for the show provides a little more detail in the comments at PVRblog:

Nope, it’s literally 15 rack-mounted TiVos of various models, many from the pre-Series 2 era. Some Philips boxes, some Sonys. And because there’s a limited number of remote codes, when a staffer operates one, he has to hold the remote directly against that box’s IR receiver so that the beam doesn’t hit any of the other boxes (i.e., so he’s not inadvertently controlling multiple boxes at once). No joke! It’s pretty primitive.

When TiVo footage is needed for TDS that day (i.e., every day), the clips are dubbed off to Beta tape and brought to an editing bay. Yup, sneakernet. Sounds like a lot of work, right? It is. I wouldn’t be surprised if the show upgrades to a networked PVR system — especially with an imminent move to HD — but I don’t know what their plans are.

The geeks all freak because the show’s not using some Linux/MythTV/multiple-tuner/RAID/networked uber-computer to handle all this, and we get a “neiner-neiner” (with bonus “la-de-da”) from “S. Nason,” who says:

I work as an editor and replay operator on live sports broadcasts. Are standard DVR is a machine called an EVS-XT, it is essentially a high end TIVO with often over 30 hours of HD recording and playback. The machines are networkable and a companion device, the X-file, allows you to back up footage to an external hard drive that is searchable by many different tags and variables. It’s hard to believe that popular nationally televised show is relying on consumer products and Beta stock.

But it sounds like Late Night with Conan O’Brien is Powered by TiVo™ too, based on this comment at BoingBoing:

At Late Night we have three TiVo’s that are set-up to record every other late night talk show, several morning to afternoon shows and a few special events that happen now and again. Every morning we burn DVD copies of the previous day’s shows, a process that takes less then 2 hours, depending on the temperament of the recorders.

Most of the time we use the DVDs to see what future guests have done for other shows, what questions they’ve been asked and if they’ve done anything ripe for comment by Conan.

I should add something pithy here to tie this all together, but I’m essentially just geeking out at seeing TiVos and Jon Stewart mentioned in the same article.

Bonus Link! Here’s a handy trick to stop your TiVo from recording reruns of shows like The Daily Show and Late Night (this used to drive me crazy):

1. Create a new WishList.
2. Enter the show title as the first Keyword (or as a Title Keyword); “Daily Show with Jon Stewart”
3. Give it a Thumbs up (which is the default)
4. Enter the generic program description as the second Keyword (NOT as a Title Keyword): “A humorous slant on top news stories”
5. Give it a thumbs down.
6. Set the WishList to Auto Record with “first run only”.

In an nutshell, this will record all new episodes and ignore episodes with generic guide data.

No more reruns. No more multiple recordings. No more random Friday recordings as part of a M-F manual recording. And TiVo can choose to record a later airing if the tuners are busy at 11:00pm.