Saturday, May 14, 2016

My set-top box is acting up

Well, it may not be the box itself acting up, but whatever DirecTV is sending to the box. I turned on the TV this morning to look for what was coming up on FXM Retro in the coming week. TCM was on, and the on-screen display indicated that I was watching Act of Violence. For some reason, I thought that I had seen Act of Violence on the schedule last week, as part of the TCM salute to Star of the Month Robert Ryan. And as I was watching the movie, I realized this definitely wasn't Act of Violence. It took a minute or two to realize I was watching Back from Eternity; sure enough, that's the movie that is listed in TCM's monthly schedule for the time slot when I turned the TV on.

So, what does this mean? When I look to see what's on TCM, I generally use the monthly schedule that I've downloaded for feature movies, and the online daily or weekly schedule for the shorts and just to make certain a feature I might want to mention hasn't been replaced. (I don't download the monthly schedule far enough in advance for it to be a problem the way it might be for people who download the monthly schedule the minute TCM puts it up on their website.) However, I tend to use the onscreen box guide to see what's coming up on FXM Retro, since their online website is terrible and as far as I can tell they don't have a downloadable schedule. Online listing sites like TitanTV and Zap2It are pains to use since they're all about pushing as much advertising and so-called "social" stuff down your throat. So when it comes to posting about what's coming up on FXM, there's the possibility that my post may turn out to be incorrect.

That having been said, right now the problem only seems to be on Saturday mornings. When I was going through the box guide, it looked as though it claimed Act of Violence would be airing yet again next Saturday morning. The rest of the TCM schedule according to the box guide seemed to fit with the monthly schedule. (The one exception is the blocks of shorts in TCM Underground; as I've posted several times the TCM monthly and online schedules and the box guide all seem to have problems with blocks of shorts.)

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