The world of EPG (Electronic Programme Guides) has moved on since they were originally introduced alongside Digital TV (and earlier if you count Teletext as the earliest example). They have moved from nice to have guides to all the many tens to hundreds of channels and what is on them right now, through to really important and functionally important parts of the Digital TV experience. What was the main driver for this? PVR/DVRs and the move to time-shifting mainstream TV.
Now we have them, so much effort is being expended on making them more effective in this multi-channel world – better navigation, simpler layouts, innovative remote control interfaces. All of this is wasted because of a lack of operational attention which is causing the ordinary man on the street to lose faith in them. What is the lack of operational attention? Making sure that the guide is in full alignment with what is broadcast, allowing the viewer to have recorded what they wanted recorded and in full.
I believe that this is being failed every day by every operator in the entire world, and I get the feeling that no-one is concentrating on this problem because it falls in the gap between the technical solutions and the operational concern and to be honest is people intensive and normally outsourced to people who really do not care as they won the contract on the lowest bid.
I see this every week on multiple platforms in the UK, where recordings fail due to recording the wrong programme, missing episodes of a programme, lack of series links for a series, series links for programmes that are not part of the same series, or record multiple copies of the same programme, all because the basic data was wrong and the platform operated the crap in, crap out paradigm even though the technology implementation is perfect.
So please, operators all over the world, make sure the EPG data is correct so viewers get what they want: The programme they want, when they want it.