Way New TV Tripping on its Own Feet
I wonder to what extent the lack of availability of a good, affordable DVR solution for HDTVs is hindering adoption of HDTV. I know that this is supposedly the year that everybody got an HDTV from Santa Claus, But we’re holding off, probably for a year or so, until the market settles down a bit. We’re pretty demanding media consumers, and after being satisfied with plain ol’ television for nearly 40 years, it doesn’t make sense to us to lose functionality (or pay an arm and a leg) just to get a bigger, clearer picture.
We’ve been hearing for some time that the Comcast DVR completely sucks eggs. Today Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal (paid subscription required, those tools) sums up the Comcast DVR experience in detail:
"You press pause and nothing happens. So you press it again. You try to
return to normal speed after fast-forwarding through commercials and
the unit takes so long to obey your command that you badly overshoot
the resumption of the program."
If that isn’t enough, the Comcast recorder also contains some serious business-model user hostility:
"In the program grid, even on a 50-inch, high-definition screen with
acres of room, the Comcast box displays just four rows of stations at a
time. Until recently, there was a fifth row, but now that has been
replaced by an ad. The ad not only sucks up space, but also is
aggravating because it gets selected each time you reach the bottom of
the grid screen."
This kind of terrible user experience doesn’t happen by accident. Why do Comcast customers accept this?
Tivo would be the obvious alternative here. But Tivo’s HDTV product is too expensive by a factor of two, and it doesn’t do as much as today’s Series 2 Tivos. Until the hi-def Tivos include TivoToGo (the feature that lets you download recorded programs to your PC so you can transfer them to other devices, including Tivos located in other rooms), we’ll likely stick with our non-HDTV Series 2 Tivo.
I’m sure that Tivo’s business is suffering because of this (and as a shareholder who witnessed a 50% gain on our Tivo stock purchase turn into a 2.5% loss as of today, this makes me doubly cranky). But I suspect it’s hurting the broadcast networks as well.
I’m frustrated by the way that TV business models aren’t catching up to the way that people are actually using television. Just one recent example: last Saturday we asked Tivo to record something at the time Saturday Night Live was on, so we missed SNL. Later we heard it was a terrific episode (including the now Internet-famous "Dick in a Box" tune) so we wanted to watch it. Since the broadcast networks don’t repeat episodes throughout the week like the cable channels do, our only alternative to get the episode on our TV was Bittorrent. We’ve since re-watched the episode three or four times (it was that funny — easily one of the best SNLs in the 30+ year history of the show).
Why can’t we pay somebody $0.99 or $1.99 to download an episode from the net onto our Tivo after the episode has already aired? The technology is definitely there. If people can download and view video an inconvenient way for free, it seems like there’s got to be a way to make it seamless and convenient and make money from it. Maybe someone needs to write a Bittorrent client for Galleon?
Update: EngadgetHD has a piece today about a consumer backlash against HDTV for reasons similar to what I spelled out in this post.
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We bought our HDTV back in mid-2000. The HD isn’t the only perk. You also get things like widescreen, which is great for DVDs. In short, you’ll find things aside from broadcast television that HDTV’s are nice for.
I will admit, however, that the Comcast DVR sucks in ways never before sucked. As Walt mentions, the box is slow. Sometimes I’ll press a button and sit there, waiting for it to do something. Then I think it didn’t hear me, so I push the button again…and again…and again. Suddenly, it wakes up and fires every one of the button clicks. If I’m really unlucky, the sequence of buttons I smashed causes something unfortunate to happen.
The Series 3 looks nice. I really enjoyed my Series 2. But one of the things I loved about the Series 2 is TivoToGo. Also, the Series 3 doesn’t appear to be $500-1000 nice. I could see $250 nice. Perhaps as high as $400 nice if TivoToGo were working. I’d consider going to $500 nice if it worked with the Comcast OnDemand programming. If it had all that and a larger hard drive, I might even go as high as $600 nice. But at that point you’ve basically built the perfect television viewing device. The only thing missing would be the NetFlix integration they’ve been teasing us with for more than a year.
I have both HDTV cable and DIRECTV for work reasons. There isn’t that much HD content out there other than sports and a few movies, I’m not sure if I’d pay for HD had it not been for work. If I were into pro-sports, it’d be a no-brainer.
On the other hand, if you live near a good PBS station that’s broadcasting OTA (over-the-air) you can pick up some decent science/art shows for free.
One other thing — HD content consumes about 10x the storage content of SD content. A two-hour movie in HD could easily consume 20-25G of disk space and take hours to transfer on a typical home network.
This TivoCommunity.com thread (http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=321006) provides a link to TitanTV, which has TV listings that are filterable by which shows are in HD — handy.
I just went through some of this same calculus and decided against buying an HDTV for now too. Being a DirecTV subscriber for years, the state of the HD DVR box is horrible. I think if my DirecTivo died, I might just cut over to an HDTV with antennea for HD broadcast and Apple TV. iTunes has nearly everything from TV I watch episodically, and at $1.99 an episode, would come out far cheaper than the $75 a month cable bill for the amount of TV I watch.
I know iTunes isn’t selling HD shows now, but the amount of HD programming you get for the amount you have to pay is untenable and I think iTunes will get there.
Yeah, there’s always Bittorrent too.