ExperienceCurve by Karl Long

This is my inaugral post on the topic of masters vs. disasters of experience, and the company that has driven me to this is comcast, I somehow envision this as a possible series of posts, although this example is one of the clearest vs. scenarios. It’s kind of like Iron Chef, and this is the DVR battle:

• Master of Experience: Tivo
• Disaster of Experience: Comcast HD DVR (by motorola*)

Tivo: bells and whilstles aside tivo is there to give me control over what I watch and it never had any catastrophic failures in that regard

Comcast DVR: Within two weeks of owning this DVR I discovered a random bug in an episode of “litttle briton” it had recorded. Now bugs are one thing and I can generally overlook glitches but this one was so unbelievably obtuse I will never forget the pain and frustration. I watched the first 15 minutes of the show and came to the inevitable commercial (which are particularly awful on BBC america) so I quickly hit fast forward on the DVR remote… and the DVR inexplicably started the show at the begining again, I mean right at the credits. Wierd, I imagined I must have hit the “start at begining of show again” button by mistake, so i hit fast forward again to get past the 15 minutes I’d already watched, and it started at the begining of the show again. Now I’m embarrassed to say how many times I watched that first 15 minutes because my desire to skip those god awful commercials. Now if I was a DVR designer and was working with a team, I can imagine saying at some point “listen guys, if there’s one thing we can’t fuck up its the fast forward”.

Tivo: Always recorded the show I wanted, I never had a nagging fear held over from my ancient reptilian brain ie. did you set the VCR

Comcast: Regularly misses episodes if I select “only record first runs”, the DVR doesn’t know a first run from its asshole and there for I’m always second guessing it. So i set up a season recording, then I go in to the “upcoming schedule” to check that it knows what it should record.

Tivo: Never recorded two of the same episode, even when I was recording the simpsons across fox and “channel 11″

Comcast: I like the daily show, but my comcast DVR is just incapable of knowing when it already recorded somthing. I went away for christmas to England for 10 days. When I returned I had about 25 of the same episode of the daily show and the colbert report. Nothing else was recorded because there wasn’t any space. And of course none of them were labeled with any identifing feature, just “the daily show”, so the only reason I know that 25 of the same episode were recorded is because i watched the first 30 seconds of so of each episode.

What can I say except Tivo is a master of experience.
Please cable companies, don’t cheap out on this if your going to get a DVR get a freaking tivo. I hate to say it, but I would pay more for the tivo option.
* Now clearly, it’s motorolas buggy DVR that is at fault here, but it was comcasts business decision to bundle a crap DVR with their cable service.