I do enjoy a good rant, so let me give you a choice excerpt from John Battelle, Internet Search Guru, on the Comcast HD DVR:
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.Not to mention, the damn thing is slow – beyond unresponsive. There’s no way you can accurately predict where and when the thing might stop and start when you are fast forwarding or rewinding. The Tivo is like an Audi, but the Comcast drives like a 1972 Gran Torino Station wagon. And the remote? My God, what a piece of sh*t!
Ah, the fine use of the language …
Okay, I do suspect this may be a Mac-vs-Windows thing, rewritten as a TiVo-vs-ComcastDVR thing.
We have a Comcast DVR (a Motorola 6412). Is the interface slow? Yes. Is it awkward and inconsistent? Sure. Could I develop an easier way of doing what it does, on paper, without stealing any of the Precioussss TiVo’s secrets? Probably.
Is it usable? Absolutely.
(Nor do I understand what the phrase “television as a conversatoin instead of a dictation” or how the Comcast DVR “misses” this core purpose.)
I would love to have something better. But, honestly? The Comcast DVR gets me 90% of what I want, for $10 a month. I’m sure the remaining 10% would make me ecstatic, but I’d much rather have the Comcast DVR than not have it, and that’s the leap I made, not the retrograde from TiVo to Comcast. So … there.
And … Comcast is going to be both upgrading the software (optionally) to that offered by TiVo, and upgrading the boxes, too. So there, too.
(Aside from a technical misunderstanding Battelle had, and what sounds like an actual faulty box, the rest of the post, and the comments, are amazing … especially in the utter vitriol that folks heap on the Comcast box. Lighten up, people!)