Comcast’s DVR is unbelievable shit.

It’s bloody amazing that though TiVo has been around for almost a decade, no one else has managed to duplicate TiVo’s experience. This leads us to many more questions, such as how, not long ago, was TiVo considered a company that almost went under? Let’s ignore that historical anecdote, however, and instead focus on the crux of the matter: TiVo is not only better than competing DVR products, but is light-years ahead of them. In fact, we’re not scared to say that TiVo is to other DVRs what the iPod is to compact discs.

We didn’t entirely realize this until recently, though we should have seen it coming from all the talk around us. In short, we previously subscribed to DirecTV when TiVo was the norm there, but then cancelled our service because we had better things to do than watch TV. While we’d like to argue that we still have better things to do, the point is that we were recently back in the market for premium programming, and given our past experiences with DirecTV, we decided to go back to cable.

“How bad could Comcast’s DVR really be,” we mused. Since we don’t know where we’ll be living in a year and a half, we figured that shelling out for a cable-based TiVo would be a waste of money, since we feasibly could end up wanting to go back to satellite programming in the future, or even something else. So, we figured we’d just rent Comcast’s basic HD DVR box.

That’s when we realized that not only is Comcast’s DVR interface horribly cumbersome and laggy, but it’s outright frustrating to do anything that TiVo handled with ease. There’s not even a search function on the dumb service. Never mind that we still don’t have working On Demand, which is one of the supposed perks of sticking to Comcast’s DVR (as the service isn’t fully supported when using a TiVo box). Even recording a show doesn’t work well.

We discovered this latter Comcast blunder when we tried recording two back-to-back episodes of Scrubs. For the first episode, we chose to record for three extra minutes, since we realized that previous recordings were cut off due to time differences in the service vis a vis the network. We did this via TiVo all the time. The difference is that while both TiVo and Comcast’s DVR automatically set themselves to record the second episode of the show (we chose the “record all first-run episodes”) feature, our Comcast DVR decided to only record three minutes of the second episode. Ridiculous.

One would think that since TiVo is a supported service, there’d be plenty competition for Comcast and other providers to get their shit together and refine their DVR interfaces. Apparently, they simply don’t care that TiVo is out there, and are even going to certain lengths to bury the fact that TiVo is a supported service. That’s why there’s barely any word about TiVo on Comcast’s web site. In fact, when we used a Comcast web form to see if TiVo service was available in our area, we were told that it was not, and yet when we talked to a Comcast representative on the phone, they admitted that this was false.

So Comcast puts out a sub-par product that is broken in multiple respects, and they seek to prevent dissemination of information that a better, working product is available, only not purchaseable from them directly. The whole experience has put us off to Comcast service, but now that we’re re-vested in TiVo, we’re pretty much stuck with cable for the near future. At least once TiVo is again sitting in our entertainment center, we can shirk off all annoyance at Comcast’s incredibly stupid attitude.

Tagged as: design, hardware, mendax.org, television