Why should DVR be this way?
Did you ever have one of those times when you asked, “How did this stuff ever get to produced?”
Perhaps you were looking at GM’s infamous “green light indicates that your headlights are on… except in some models, where it indicates that they are off.”
Or Mercedes’ “ha-ha, tricked you, that’s the cruise control stalk, not the turn signal.”
Or the mismatched tail-lights of the Chrysler Sebring.
Or the gas line routing on several years of slant sixes.
Today, my wonder takes me to the joys of telephone and television, two things which used to be very simple. If you wanted a telephone, you went to your Bell, and most of the time, they’d set you up with a phone that always worked, day in and day out, with very little confusion. If something did go wrong, unless you had NYNEX, they’d probably fix it right away with an apology, the first time you asked, without making you press 30 buttons and give your phone number six times. Or cable TV, which used to be pretty simple… get a cable-ready TV and plug it in, and or a cable-ready box and plug it into the TV.
We recently had Verizon FIOS. This is a fiber optic system designed for incredibly high speeds. For TV, we had a DVR supplied by Verizon. It was a real piece of work; the first two self-destructed, the second one from a bad hard drive. The third one was OK if you rebooted it now and then, and didn’t mind a frequent and unpredictable pause while it thought about things. The Internet access was very fast when it worked, and when it wasn’t very slow. Ironically, we ended up dumping Verizon for two reasons – they’re $80/month more than Cablevision’s “triple play,” which is more than I used to spend on cable and Internet access combined (come to think of it, it’s more than I pay now, too), which is a lot to spend each year. The other reason was they couldn’t fix some telephone programming issues, after repeated efforts. (I DO mean repeated, over and over and over again, wasting hours of my time.)
For reasons I never understood, the Verizon people never felt they should test the “repairs” they made. They insisted everything was fine because, well, they’d fixed it, right?
So we switched to Cablevision, and it was mainly easy. The phone worked right away, though I had to make two calls to get the caller ID set up right – we’re not Sea Board Marketing and never have been. The Internet access feels faster than Verizon’s, though it isn’t; there’s less lag time. For large files, it’s slower; for small files, it’s faster. But the DVR…
Ironically, just as Verizon failed us mainly as a phone company, Cablevision is failing us as a TV provider. Their DVR, a Scientific Atlanta 8300HD, is absurdly designed. You can’t restrict the channels to your favorites; you can’t NOT move up/down through certain channels. You can’t restrict their guide to your favorites. (You can, in TiVO and Verizon). And, while supposedly you can program it from the Web, that feature is broken for us. It’ll be fixed, we’re told, between now and two days from now.
There’s more. We should be able to set the DVR to record in standard-def to preserve the hard drive. We should be able to tell it, as we did the Verizon box, to record five minutes before and after a program, because TV stations keep starting and ending late to annoy DVR users (at least, we assume that’s why). There’s no 30-second or 1-minute commercial skip. Again, these features are all available from Verizon (except programming the DVR from the Web.)
Indeed, we should be able to set all these preferences from the Web, too.
Do the designers of these things have no budgets? Or no imagination? Does nobody do usability testing? Competitive intelligence? Any sort of comparisons at all? Or is everything geared to making a pretty brochure?
There are times I really don’t understand how things like this get out, much less become the standard. (Don’t even get me started on Windows – or the MacOS!). We keep seeing superior products ignored or abandoned (Microsoft Word 5.1a and Cricket Graph 1.3.2 and 1999 Neon, we’ll always miss you!) while inferior ones are put out. We keep seeing product revisions where long-standing bugs are left standing, while useless or unwanted features are added… or where the very things people liked about a product are dropped (PT teardrop headlights) while things the owners don’t want are added (PT towel bar).
How does this stuff ever make it through? Who’s making these decisions? Is anything thinking at all, or is stuff being pumped out by reflex?
It makes me wonder.
In the meantime, I’m pricing TiVos…