How long is a baseball game? I just did an Internet search and found varying times, but the average seems to be about 2 hours and 47 minutes. That means there are plenty of games that run over three hours.
The first game of the World Series ran four hours. The second ran close to 3 hours and 35 minutes. In the playoffs, the Red Sox and the Yankees played two back-to-back games that each ran over five hours. One came close to six.
Simple enough. So why does my TiVo presume that all baseball games are three hours long?
Well, I know why: They take their schedules from the networks, and the networks use that number. But that's because that's the least amount of time the game will consume. If it starts at 5:00, the following show is announced for 8:00 because that's when it may start. It won't start earlier than that but it may start later…or not start at all. That's fine for their purposes. But if you're TiVoing a baseball game for later watching, you're not going to use that number. The odds are pretty good that you'll lose the end of the game.
Some day, personal video recorders and TV networks will have some sort of alliance where a little "end of show" signal will be encoded in broadcasts, and you'll be able to set your TiVo (or whatever we're using then) to record until it receives that signal. Right now, if you want to record a baseball game and don't want to live dangerously, you need to pad your recording time with an extra three hours for a total of six. And even then, one of these days, there'll be some incredible multi-inning game that will run longer than that and you'll come home and find your machine didn't get the end of it. The Chicago White Sox and the Milwaukee Brewers once played a game lasting 8 hours and 6 minutes.
I don't have a solution to this, other than that TiVo should maybe pop up a little reminder any time you set to record a baseball game for three hours. But I'll bet the next generation of digital video recorders addresses the problem…or maybe the generation after that.