Alec Saunders SquawkBox

The digital video recorder was one of those game changing pieces of technology when it first debuted in 1998.  In our house, as in many, it has become a mainstay, especially through the last couple of weeks of the Olympics.  So let’s just say I was jazzed when Bell announced their remotepvr service. 

With Bell Remote PVR, you can now search listings, queue the PVR to record shows, manage the recordings you already have, and when you come home, you can watch them. And you can even do it on your iPhone using the Bell Remote PVR iPhone app.   Sounds good, no?

Well, the answer is no.  It’s just not a very good app, bearing all the hallmarks of being rushed to market with little user testing.  For example:

• The iPhone app has no “remember me” for the login.  Each time it starts you have to fumble around with logging in, and with the Bell user name and password security requirements that’s a lot of shifting and typing to get the required combination of letters and numbers in there.
• In a universe of 313 “now on” shows, the UI metaphor is a scrolling web page – complete with a next link at the bottom of each page allowing you see the entries 30 at a time.  You can search easily, but browsing to see what’s on is annoying.
• Bell TV allows you to add a secondary disk for archival purposes.  Want to hang onto a show?  Simply archive it.  And that’s good, because the only disk that you can record to is the primary disk.  What that means is that periodically you have to tell the box to archive material you want to keep.  RemotePVR let’s you see everything on the PVR, but doesn’t differentiate between archived and primary disk. You can delete a show from anywhere, but you can’t move a show from primary to archive.

These are basically nits, however. With a little polish, this jewel in the rough might become a gem.

By far the biggest let-down of this application follows.

If you were looking through a listing of previously recorded shows using your iPhone, and saw this screen, what would you think that the Watch button is intended to do?

Or how about this…  While browsing the guide, I note that Canada AM is currently on, and click on the show.  The following screen is displayed.  What would you think the Watch button would do in this circumstance?

Only one way to find out, right?  Go ahead and press it.  And this is what you get. 

No video plays, though, which is a bit strange. No matter how many times I press that play and pause button the video just doesn’t seem to show. 

So what does it do?  I’ll give you one clue… Janice just wandered into our home office and asked who was watching the TV downstairs.  It turns out that the TV is blasting out CTV’s Canada AM as I write this, and it started up when I pressed that watch button.    You can’t actually stream a show to your iPhone, but your iPhone can serve as a substitute remote while you’re watching TV.

In other words, to watch TV using Bell REMOTE PVR you have to be sitting in front of your TV. 

Oops.

In The Influence of TiVo, Dale Dougherty talks about how TiVo has changed the perception of television.  When TiVo, and it’s competitor ReplayTV, came out, they completely changed my use of television, and permanently. The critical feature was not storage capacity, the ability to pause live TV, nor the onscreen guide, but rather that the device had the intelligence to be able to select programming that I might want to see at a later time.  I routinely set the box to scan for my favorite program (Star Trek — yes, I am a geek!), and then watched episode after episode at my leisure, usually during my daily workout.  I parked the treadmill in front of the TV.

When I returned to Canada in 2000, I spent heavily on a home theater.  We built a room in our new house, and equipped it with a 62″ high definition television, a kickass sound system, high definition satellite decoder, etc etc etc.  But you know, my Replay box quit working.  There were no listings available for it north of the US border. ExpressVu, the satellite provider I use here in Canada, doesn’t provide an adequate substitute.  Their PVR (which I own also) is a crufty old unit based on the Dishplayer.  Rogers, their competition on cable, is no better.  Both of their PVR products are basically overgrown VCRs that demand to be programmed all the time.   They don’t provide the value that a PVR needs to provide.  They don’t help me select from the 500 odd channels of programming that the satellite provides in any meaningful way.  Their products make it a chore to search the guide for the programming that I want to see, and channel surfing serves up endless reams of garbage programming. 

Nothing has changed my viewing habits more than the simple keyword select / record capability of those original PVR devices — not high definition (which I love), nor satellite, nor pay per view.  And now that I’ve been denied that capability, I no longer have the patience to go back to watching TV the old way.  Television has lost any advertising dollars that might be associated with my viewing, because I simply no longer watch. 

For the last seven years, aside from the odd hockey game, TV has been dead for me.   I missed most of Enterprise, and a lot of Voyager.  I’ve never seen an episode of the new Battlestar Galactica, which I understand is getting rave reviews.  I haven’t ever seen the Office, Weeds, Colbert (except on YouTube), Prison Break, the new Dr. Who, Rome, Grey’s Anatomy, House or… well, the list goes on and on.  My theater, which I spent so lavishly on, has become a place to watch DVD movies, not television.

Give me a PVR that does what a PVR should do, Bell ExpressVu, and I will be back in a heartbeat.  If Rogers does it first, expect me to ditch all of my ExpressVu gear and jump ship.  If neither of you can muster the will to provide products that your customers truly want to buy… well, you deserve to die the death that the internet and BitTorrent will surely bring you.

And you know what the worst part is?  My treadmill is still parked in front of my TV… gathering dust.  In dropping TV, I’ve also mostly dropped my workout.  Ironically, not watching television is making me fat.

Tong writes about the rise of BitTorrent.  He’s right.  I am one of those millions who download my favorite TV shows and watch them when it’s convenient for me.  Why don’t I use a PVR?  My satellite provider, ExpressVu, provides a PVR that, politely put, is garbage.  No search capability worth talking about, no "season’s ticket", and no HD.  It’s little better than a VCR built around a hard disk. 

What I want is an HD version of TiVO or Replay that can grab shows off the web with BitTorrent if I miss recording to disk when the show is aired.  Why is this so hard?

Cheap chips seen driving next tech wave: From News.COM. In general I think this is true, with the exception of the assertion that products will be sold below cost, and the difference made up in service fees.  This is a flawed model for most businesses.  Consumers have demonstrated that they are willing to pay for some kinds of content, and for some kinds of communications services using fees that allow the handset to be subsidized, but certainly not anywhere near the breadth of services and content that folks were envisioning just a couple of years ago.  Some whacky models were getting tried out, including Microsoft’s notion that WebTV customers would be willing to pay $10/month extra for fast forward / rewind capabilities on the PVR.  Whew!