There’s been a lot of talk today about how NBC really screwed TiVo users during last night’s series finale of Friends. Basically, TiVo, for those of you that don’t know, uses third-party program data to schedule various recordings. Most American TV programs start and end on the hour or half-hour with little deviation. (I can remember when TBS began starting programs at 5 minutes past the hour way back in the 80’s sometime).

This season, NBC has really tried to exploit some of TiVos idiosyncracies by starting and ending their shows at odd times, just before or after the ttop of the hour. The idea is that if you schedule TiVo to tape CSI on CBS at 8pm CT and want to catch ER on NBC at 9pm CT, if NBC starts ER at 8:59pm, it will conflict with your taping of CSI. If you are aware of this problem, then you are forced to make a choice about which program to tape since TiVo doesn’t have the intelligence to make adjustments. Besides, do you really want to miss the last minute of CSI to catch the first minute of ER? TiVo doesn’t know. If you simply have season passes for these programs and don’t pay close attention, then the program with the higher priority will record while the other one won’t.

Well, last night, NBC ran a clip show Friends at 7pm CT and started the actual finale at 7:59pm CT. Now, the program data that TiVo displayed indicated that the show would end at 8:59pm CT, but the show actually went to 9:06pm CT. This is made worse by the fact that the climax of the episode (does Rachel come back for Ross?) occurred at 8:59pm CT. If you TiVo’d the program and didn’t make adjustments (or record ER) you missed the climax. Luckily for you, the episode will be out on DVD next week. Hmmmm …. coincidence?

It will be interesting to see if there’s any backlash from this ploy, either directly through complaints by TiVo users to NBC or indirectly by TiVo users not scheduling NBC programs in the future.

Either way, this serves to illustrate that media audiences are changing quickly as technology evolves and that programmers need to react and adapt to these changes. I don’t know if NBC has the right idea, but at least they acknowledge the trends.