Searching for an answer to why everything had suddenly gone to crap, I spent hours reading on the TiVo Community Forum message boards and contacting TiVo directly. It seems the prevailing theory is that Digital Navigator calls out for programming data at the top of the hour. During this data access query, the cable box ignores IR signals from the remote control, and therefore loses the remote IR sequence for channel changing sent by the TiVo box to change the channel.

After talking with TiVo, their senior tech people really had no workaround other than updating season passes to record a minute early or a minute late, which screws up other programming. They also tried a delay hack to make the IR signal transmit more slowly, but that didn't work either.

If Denise and I were going to watch TV on our TiVos, it was beginning to seem we'd either have to accept missing the first or last minute of each program, or take the chance that the TiVo would record the wrong channel. That meant we could no longer be assured of getting each new episode of our favorite shows.

But Denise and I weren't the only ones experiencing this fun, new problem. Apparently, this is going to be a cascading problem for thousands of consumers. It hit Time Warner Cable in Kansas City back in March, and many of us here in Central Florida, last week. As the new OS update propagates throughout the cable systems using these boxes, more and more TiVo users with IR repeaters will lose programming.

And that brings us back to the question of purposeful or inadvertent sabotage. You see, most cable companies don't like TiVos, Windows Media Centers, MythTVs, and any other add-on device that performs DVR functions.

Mission conflict
As the business currently runs, companies like TiVo and Microsoft who provide add-on DVR solutions have a direct conflict of mission from the cable companies.

First, cable companies derive a measurable revenue stream from pay-per-view. Although many DVRs will allow you to access pay-per-view events in a convoluted fashion, most don't work well with the pay-per-view products and, as a result, third-party DVR users often don't buy pay-per-view.

Second, cable companies rent out their own DVRs. My local company charges $16.95 per month, per DVR. That's $203.40 per year, just about what it would cost to buy a DVR. So if my competing DVR lasts three years, my cable company would lose more than $600 in revenue.

Third, DVR companies like TiVo want to let consumers record broadcast video. As we've seen in well-publicized legal battles, the television and movie industries have issues with digital rights management and tend to fear anything that seems to let consumers have access to media properties. After all, once little Bobby records You Don't Mess With the Zohan, who knows who he'll give a copy to?

Finally, there's the whole interoperability issue. Each cable network is a complex and dynamic beast. Connecting new devices to it means that the cable company has to support (in some minimal way, at least) all these newfangled gadgets, making their tech support job all that much harder.