Why We're Stuck With Bad Cable Boxes
I sympathize with MG Siegler’s complaint that cable boxes and the remotes they come with are cheap, badly designed junk. We’ve got two Comcast boxes in our home, and they’re badly designed both as hardware and software: Big and ugly, unwieldy, and with matching poorly designed software, the best you can say about them is that they’re basically functional.
Siegler suggests that, just as Apple, Google, and Blackberry shook up the mobile phone market, taking power from carriers and giving it to device makers, maybe the same thing could happen in the cable box market. Problem is, there’s been an elegant, smartly designed solution from an outside manufacturer on the market for years, but it’s never become more than a niche product.
Yes, I’m talking about TiVo, which is everything that Comcast’s ugly gray boxes are not. In particular, TiVo offers sleek, smart menu design — something to which the cable carriers seem deeply opposed (it might prevent them from stuffing the menus with ads!).
The problem with TiVo is that, for most people, it’s just too expensive for what it offers. As I said, as bad as Comcast’s boxes are, they’re more or less functional. They get the job done (if rather inelegantly). We’ve got one, but most people aren’t willing to shell out a couple hundred dollars plus a subscription fee just for a nicer looking box and better menus. Ours is a legacy product from before we lived together, and if we didn’t already have a lifetime subscription, I’m not sure we’d choose to stick with it.
Add in the fact that owning a TiVo makes cable installation more of a pain (at least when you’ve got Comcast), and they can make it impossible to access some on-demand features, and it’s just not worth the hassle. Perhaps if someone could bring the price down — I imagine the price threshold would have to be under $150 with no subscription fee for it to really catch on — we might see improvements in this field. But for now, my sense is that we’re stuck with whatever Comcast and Time Warner and the rest of the cable companies give us.
Hmm, I’ll post a barely on topic question since I don’t know (or care) about television.
You say:
Is this some corner of, or at least metaphor of, the whole net-neutrality issue? Is it true that the US internet market has been gobbled up by oligopolists like Comcast? Eurocrats reckon they can do better
However others think in different ways.
— Adrian Ratnapala · Oct 11, 06:43 PM · #
I’m tempted to day that people who won’t shell out for TiVo don’t deserve it. But that’s not true. The alternatives offered by Comcast et. al. are horrible. Embarrasing. Aggressively awful. No one deserves them. I’ve used the Comcast box—briefly. It is no exaggeration to say that I would abandon television before giving up my TiVo (or a hypothetical product with similar attention to detail).
— Jay · Oct 11, 09:49 PM · #
Microsoft’s Ultimate TV was, almost a decade ago, better than any cable box and DVR I’ve seen since. It was a DirectTV receiver with dual tuners and DVR. You could pop in a huge Hard Drive and store tons of stuff. The software was great, elegant, easy to use, better than TiVo, even modern TiVo. Of course, Microsoft killed the product.
— henny youngman · Oct 12, 07:43 PM · #
As a matter of fact, I just got my new cable box from Comcast, and it’s small enough to fit in my pocket.
Remote is still a ridiculous mass of puzzling buttons, though.
— Andy · Oct 12, 08:00 PM · #
This just shows why government monopolies are better than private ones. Comcast doesn’t care if you hate their boxes unless you cancel your cable, and you can’t lobby them. Though I suppose if you have enough money you can buy a lot of their stock and get on the board.
Obviously an actual competitive market would be even better, but this IS cable television we’re talking about here.
— JosephFM · Oct 15, 03:40 PM · #
Remember when deregulation was supposed to fix all this? What happened with that? I live in Nebraska’s 2nd largest city and still have to get my cable from Time-Warner, or from no one at all.
— Chet · Oct 15, 06:02 PM · #