The other day I was watching a movie through Comcast On Demand.  At one point, I needed to pause the movie briefly, but accidentally did this with the TiVo remote instead of the Comcast remote.

Q1: What happened?

A1: Pausing worked just fine.  TiVo was recording the On Demand movie to its hard disk just like a regular TV program.  (As an aside, this is a simple way to store On Demand movies beyond the 24 hours they give you.)

When the movie credits rolled, I wanted to make sure TiVo was ready to record its next show, so I tried to exit the On Demand system and go back to regular TV.  I hit “stop” with the Comcast remote, but nothing happened.  I got really close to the receiver, tried a few more times, and still no effect.  I tried some other buttons.  Finally, the movie did stop playing, but at this point it seemed to have a mind of its own, moving randomly through the Comcast menus.

Q2: What was going on?

A2: Ever since I had paused the movie, I had been watching it about a minute behind the “live” broadcast.  At the end of the movie, when I hit stop on the Comcast remote, I wasn’t affecting what I was seeing at that moment, but rather what I would be seeing a minute in the future.  When the remote seemed to take on a mind of its own, that was TiVo playing back what I had made Comcast do a minute before.

Sanity was restored by fast-forwarding TiVo to the present.

Here’s a video of me attempting a pretty tough descent.