This was extremely common especially once cable boxes started to get more advanced guides and built in dvr. The TV guide just became a catalog of what you wanted to watch. All watching you'd do completely inside recordings. It was nice when they added their own episode catalog (on-demand I believe it was called, before we started calling it streaming) and would skip the dvr recording of an episode and go straight to their on-demand one. Or when you started watching something mis-show and the cable box would offer to restart from beginning from their on-demand offering.