John Battelle delivers an inspired rant about his astonishingly loathsome Comcast 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!
But that's not where the crappiness ends. No, not by a long shot.
Go, John, go! Link
Reader comment:
Aaron says:
FYI, the blog this story links to is angry because he thinks the comcast dvr uses flash ram instead of a HD (which is why he thinks he lost his programming when he lost power.)
Some of what he mentions is true, the dvr is slow as hell, and not very feature rich. But I can tell you that the dvr most assuredly does have hard drive storage, not flash ram.
I've got a comcast dvr in my bedroom – a few times when I've had the space heater on while my GF dries her hair the fuse blows and we lose power. But after flipping it back on my dvr hard drive is fine. No lost programming.
I'm not a comcast tech, so I can't say why this happened to him, what I can say is that it was not the same as my experience when the power goes out.
