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April 18, 2005
That Was Then, This is Comcast
It's with no small amount of regret that I report that for the first time since we moved in November, we're once again paying for television.
Funny thing about living without TV for 6 months - you don't miss it as much as you thought you might. I remember as a kid reading about some youngster who decided not to watch TV for a year. I don't remember why - maybe it was lent, or a new years resolution -- I do remember that at the time I was sure their parents had something to do with inspiring this particular goal. Anyway, I thought they were mad - certifiable.
I've changed my mind.
The Comcast installer showed up at 9am on Saturday and started the 4 hour process of running an aerial cable shot from the pole on the public road affronting out property to the roof-line of the house; finally punching through into the room with the TV (of course one of the rooms in the house not pre-wired with coax) and installing a wall-plate. Before leaving he got the info off my cable modem, and brought in the comcast DVR (more later) - making sure the modem got block-sync and the DVR was receiving signal.
When we got back from running some errands, I took the 20 minutes and switched the network over from the Qwest DSL to the cable modem. It's faster (technically twice as fast downstream, though that would be hard to notice subjectively) and hopefully more reliable. At the end of a week, I'll either be canceling the cable modem or the DSL. The DSL has been flaky - mostly, I suspect, due to the P.O.S. modem's they use (Actiontec). Every-time it wigs out I reset the modem and a couple minutes later (once it's finally done rebooting and syncing) the world comes back. At this point, on the data side, it's Comcast's game to lose. (Hopefully there won't be a repeat of last week's outage.)
I spent a few minutes surfing the channel guide and marveling at the "57 channels of nothing on." I explored the DVR long enough to decide that aside from handling HD input, it's inferior in just about every way to my 5 year old Series 1 DirecTiVo. And the funny part is Microsoft seems proud enough of it to promenantly label it "Microsoft Enhanced."
I'm sure I'll rant plenty more later, but for now, how 'bout: it can record two shows at once (good) but not play back a third while doing so (eh?).
The search interface is gawd-awful. While searching for shows by title, titles are truncated on the results screen and there seems to be no way to display the full title. Once you've selected a program title, the following screen doesn't display what you were searching for, so if there are no search results, you've got a screen with precisely zero informational value. To make matters worse - there doesn't seem to be a way to navigate "back" to the title search screen without starting a new search. So if you're looking for a show who's title has a common prefix, good luck. You'll have to guess which of the partial titles is the right one, and if you guess wrong you'll have to start the search over, navigate back to the right part of the alphabet, and guess again.
Their equivalent of "season passes" seems pretty close to the TiVo, but again the interface is terrible - to set the options for a season pass you end up visiting a half-dozen modal screens. It comes down to the TiVo's use of left and right to toggle through options vs. the Comcast "drop-down" like behavior (you select the field you want to edit, and it pops to a screen with the available options, you select the one you want then say "OK.")
It's a case study in crappy HCI. Dawnise managed to use it for a whole 5 minutes before getting frustrated and giving up.
Microsoft Enhanced indeed...
I figure I'll give it a month and if we haven't started using it, it'll go back, and we'll probably cancel the TV service all-together (or perhaps we'll buy a stand-alone TiVo and sacrifice the dual tuner record capability for a usable interface).
Posted by dberger at April 18, 2005 8:02 AM