Deep Jive Interests

This really isn’t a blog about personal electronics, but there are times when there is a meme that personally affects me, that I feel requires my shrill commentary.

John Batelle goes on the warpath about Comcast’s DVR — the anti-TIVO apparently (I love this guy’s pithy prose):

Good Lord, it doth suck. The interface is simply abominable. Unintuitive and careless, it copies the major features of Tivo’s approach but fails at every single detail – and in UI design, everything is in the details. No surprisingly, it utterly misses the core purpose of a DVR: to treat television as a conversation instead of a dictation. Without a doubt, this is an interface built either by Machiavelli’s cohorts, or by graceless bureaucrats, or both. No, wait, it’s worse. This is a product built by people who fundamentally don’t understand the computing paradigm. That’s it – they really don’t get television as a database. Imagine the folks at DEC trying to build a Macintosh. That’s Comcast’s DVR

We recently upgraded to an HD-PVR unit ourselves, and unfortunately, while you can purchase Tivo’s and bring them to Canada, there’s absolutely no support — so if something goes wrong, you’re SOL.

Rogers, our cable company, supplies a Scientific Atlanta 8300HD – and it is no Tivo. I’m not sure if its level of suckage is equivalent to ComCast’s HD-PVR box, but it also has

1. a terrible UI – clumsy, unwieldy, difficult to search for programs (I could go on)

2. unsophisticated system for saving programs – often lops off the first few minutes or last few minutes of any show

3. unsophisticated pause/live tv–> 1 – will automagically switch to a saved program — even if you’re in the middle of watching something else (such as time-shifted TV)

4. unsophisticated pause/live tv–> 2 – can sometimes chop in half a “saved” program that you are watching “live” if you pause it for too long.

Since I’m still in the honeymoon phase of just having a PVR, all of these things are more or less forgivable … for now.

But Thomas Hawk makes a great point on his blog – why don’t these larger companies just buy Tivo?

My cynical mind says that it makes no sense to be shelling out cash for a better solution, when these billion dollar cable companies (Comcast in the US, Rogers in Canada) have a strangle hold on a locked in customer base as it is; sure, Tivo represents a viable competitor — but the pressure’s clearly not strong enough, or a big enough threat to that revenue stream.