Yesterday seemed to be NYT day! I mentioned the Nasty blogs article, as well as the NYT’s blogging efforts this morn. And today, we discussed the proliferation of online financial video.
Have a look at an amusing animation from the NYT’s David Pogue.
Surprisingly, David does not mention TiVo’s vastly superior design and delightful user interface. Every Cable DVR I’ve touched has been about 5 years behind TiVo
click for video
One of life’s most frustrating things…aside from getting a tele-marketing call is working my comcast dvr.
My typical night looks like this.. I am watching a game then let’s say I hit pause to take a pee break, but then it appears it didn’t work so I hit it again it, and again it doesn’t work. Next I hit the FF button but that didn’t work either so I go back to hit stop and that doesn’t work so I then start pressing buttons randomly wondering if any work (note – this happens nightly, it appears I am not smart enough to learn the techincal glitch’s do in fact happen nightly). I digress…so after about 10 or so button push’s and nothing happening the system catch’s up to itself and goes through each command FF,pause, pause boom boom bling in less than two seconds. In the end it usually changes the channel and misses the entire next 30 seconds of play.
And yes I did swap for another cable box. Everyone experiences this.
Dude — Get a Tivo
They are FREE
Tivo indeed has an excellent user interface. But it took them about 5 years too long to get people to understand exactly what it is that their product does, despite a substantial marketing budget. Someone should really do a b-school case study on this company.
The HD version is around 600+, Why would you have a DVR but not HDTV?
JEB is right about MOT’s box, and its bizarre caching of commands when it randomly decides to go out for lunch. Sadly one competent software engineer could have that fixed in a couple of weeks. They did do a software upgrade and it made things worse.
I have both a cablevision DVR and a Tivo NTSC. Bottomline is CV’s DVR does HD. Does it reasonably well and cheaper then Tivo HD. If you are into archiving and networking the NTSC Tivo is superior. If you just “tape” and watch? CV’s HD-DVR.
JM,
Really, to be accurate, you should say it this way “the only thing a CV HD DVR does better than a non-HD Tivo is record HD.” And yeah, HD Tivo isn’t cheap. Porsches cost more than go carts also.
However, HD is everything. Unfortunately,last I checked, Tivo neglected to add the archiving and networking functionality to the Series 3HD that really sets Tivo apart from a DVR. Also, they neglected to add ATSC tuner for OTA broadcasts. Two decisions that mystify me, considering the cost. How nice would it be to record 2 HD programs at once (one OTA, one cable) and still watch the Mets (or any other cable HD show) in HD? That would have been worth the $$$.
I have a Tivo series II for about 4 years and a new Cablevision Scientific Alantic HD Cable convertor with DVR. The Cablevison DVR sucks you select a program to play you previously recorded and get a blank screen. The user interface is horrible and it doesn’t record programs it says it will. The tivo works flawlessly. I am planning on giving back my Cablevision DVR and getting a Tivo Series III HD that interfaces with the cable company directly and uses their cards after they have been out for a while. Although Tivo is more costly, it is worth it.