My Set Top Box Turns Itself Off

iliketruth

I use my Fios with my own Tivo, so I want the set top box on all the time. But lately, my set top box keeps turning itself off, several times per week. I have had the box replaced twice. It is still doing it. The first time box was replaced, it brought the frequency of turn-offs down to a tolerable once a week or so. I can live with a few missed shows. But as the weeks went by, it starting turning itself off more and more frequently until it became every day or even twice a day. The second time it was replaced the switched box my boxes from Motorola to Cisco. That was Wednesday, and my new Cisco box stayed on until Saturday before turning itself off the first time. Now today is Monday and it just went off again. I've never seen it go off while I was watching a show, just when it is unattended. But then, I don't watch very much live TV, so that could be just coincidence. It's not power failures or someone else in the house doing it. It's just haunted. I never had this problem with Comcast and rarely had the problem in first year of having FIOS. Same TV, same TIVO, same location the whole time. Any theories?

iliketruth

New theory found by Googling: TIVO regularly switches channels to record stuff I didn't ask for (it's a feature, not a bug). It's called "Tivo's Suggestions" and the more blank space there is on the disk, the more it does it. If it lands on a channel I don't subscribe to, the set top box may turn itself off after some period of time of receiving no signal. The fix is to either program TIVO so that it knows which channels are active for me (and only suggests shows on those channels) or to program it so it will not do TIVO suggestions. I chose the latter, since it's easier, at least as a test of the theory. If that works, I will laboriously program it to know my FIOS channels so I can resume getting its "suggestions" recorded automatically again. (Not that I often like TIVO suggested programs -- but what the heck).