# Why should it be easier to navigate a channel guide on the web than on the TiVo?



## tluxon (Feb 28, 2002)

Could TiVo please consider designating the FF and REW buttons as "page a day forward" and "page a day back" buttons when the channel guide is up? This would greatly speed up our preferred practice of browsing the channel guide for upcoming shows we'd like to record.

Having been accustomed to using ReplayTVs and our cable company DVRs, manually browsing the channel guide grid for shows we didn't want to miss was very user-friendly and simple to do. There are buttons for skipping a day forward or back which made it really easy to quickly check primetime programming on a daily basis for the upcoming week. I never found it so cumbersome as to prefer doing such browsing on the not-a-lot-better web-based guides.

Enter the TiVoHDs we just bought. Navigating the guide is so painfully slow and cumbersome that we're figuring we'll have to keep at least one of our cable co's boxes for this task - as we don't have PCs at each sofa (the notebook PCs aren't permanently parked there). At $13 a month for one cableco DVR we're not really excited about that, but would probably choose it over the basic $5 STB so we would at least make time-shifting available over a firewire output for our D-VHS VCR.

I've been disappointed that a great many TiVo users have just accepted that guide browsing is not very efficient and recommended relying on season passes, wishlists, and the web guides. Don't get me wrong - I love being able to set recordings from the web - but the kind of programming we like to watch changes dramatically from week to week and we base our viewing choices quite a bit on current show descriptions in the guide.

Again, could TiVo please consider designating the FF and REW buttons as "page a day forward" and "page a day back" buttons when the channel guide is up? I'm sure we're not the only ones who would benefit from this.

Thank you.


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## bkdtv (Jan 9, 2003)

Are you using the Tivo guide or the grid guide?

With the Tivo-style guide, you can skip ahead pretty fast with channel +/-.


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## tluxon (Feb 28, 2002)

bkdtv said:


> Are you using the Tivo guide or the grid guide?
> 
> With the Tivo-style guide, you can skip ahead pretty fast with channel +/-.


That's true, but there are many reasons for preferring the grid guide - namely being able to compare the listings of multiple channels simultaneously - and it takes more than a single button press to toggle between the two styles (AFAIK - and I haven't programmed this into my Theater Master remote yet). Rather than simply suggesting a workaround, how difficult would it be to provide page forward and page back functions?


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## megazone (Mar 3, 2002)

I think the problem is finding buttons. FF/RW are already in use, they move the guide one 'screen' at a time - or three time slots. So if you have 1:00am/1:30am/2:00am on the screen and hit FF you get 2:30am/3:00am/3:30am. And a lot of people like that. Left/right goes one slot at a time.

Maybe Instant Replay and Advance could to back and forward by a day?

If I ever need to check a specific day I usually hit Enter and then pick the date directly.


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