This journalist has a love/hate relationship with her DVR
Marguerite Reardon has a write up over at CNet where she describes her love/hate relationship with her DVR (a Scientific Atlanta 8000). Her biggest complaint is probably one that is shared by many – too much complexity for the average user.
At the start she realized that her DVR stopped recording her shows that were set to record for the season (she already had Time Warner replace her first DVR). This incident then got the ball rolling on the idea that more of the complex operations (scheduling, storage, rebooting, etc) would be better for consumers if the cable companies could do it all on their end (sort of like what Cablevision was trying to do with their network DVR).
In an ideal world, PVR/DVR use would be as easy as pie. Sure, some systems are close (TiVo comes to mind), but all too often features take priority over usability. In a case like this, more does not necessarily mean better, especially if more means more things that can go wrong.
Technorati Tags: PVR, DVR, TiVo
[…] As a follow up to the CNet article I posted about yesterday, Marguerite wrote her own follow up with regards to the problems she was having with Time Warner. After getting a third box, it turned out that the issue wasn’t so much the DVR as much as it was the signal strength coming in over her cable line. […]