TVSquad

I'm starting to feel like Hulu was designed specifically for people who don't have cable or satellite television. Well, people who only need a handful of cable channels including Sci-Fi, FX, and Bravo, anyway. I've been using Hulu to keep up with a couple of shows that I can't pick up with my terrestrial digita antenna, like Battlestar Galactica and The Riches. But Hulu only keeps new episodes of each show online for a limited time, so if you forget to watch for a few weeks you could miss a show.

Now Hulu has added a subscription feature that helps ensure you never miss a show. Hulu already let you add programs to a queue for later viewing. But now the site has two new features which make the queue more useful. First, when you subscribe to a show, new episodes will automatically be added to your queue. Second, you can set your queue properties so that Hulu will shoot you an email any time a new item is added to your queue.

So here's the challenge: find a way to automatically schedule your TiVo to record any movie in your Netflix queue that's scheduled to run in the next few weeks. That way you can save the postage on that movie and grab something else from your queue next.

One enterprising user tried to create a solution using Yahoo! Pipes, but that didn't really work out. Now he's written a Greasemonkey script for Firefox. It doesn't automatically schedule recordings, but it does make it easier to cross reference your Netflix queue and your TiVo recordings.

Basically the script scans the titles of movies in your queue and then searches the TiVo web site. If there's a match, a little link to the TiVo search results shows up on your Netflix page. Apparently it takes a while to perform the search, so it takes some time for the links to load.