Cable DVRs and Competition

TechCommunityAPIAdmin · ‎Jun 26 2019

First published on TechNet on Mar 28, 2005

I’ve been a DVR user since around the year 2000 when I purchased a ReplayTV (then sold by SonicBlue). A couple of years later its disk was too small for the programs all I was recording and it lacked some of the features available newer DVRs, like broadband, so I compared the TiVo and ReplayTV's current versio(which was being sold by Panasonic after it acquired SonicBlue). I decided to go with ReplayTV again, because it matched most of TiVo’s features, but primarily because I was familiar with it and its ability to skip forward 7 or 30 seconds makes it extremely easy to avoid commercials.

Unfortunately, the unit I purchased wouldn’t contact the ReplayTV service. In a manner that reminded all too much of many experiences with Windows software it reported an error that was something like “Error: 80004030. Contact Technical Support” (which was strange because that looks like a Windows COM error message, but ReplayTV ran on Linux). After an hour on the phone with a less-than-helpful customer service representative, who was probably talking to me from India, I gave up and returned the unit.

Just before I had purchased the ReplayTV I’d received a mailer from my cable company, Time Warner, announcing that they were offering a DVR service for a mere $20 per month (in addition to the digital cable fee). I decided to sign up because I figured that since I didn’t own the DVR, I could avoid the expense of upgrading every couple of years like I would end up doing if I went with a TiVo. Plus, the DVR doubles as the cable set top box, has two receivers allowing you to tape two shows at the same time, and I believed it would have an authoritative schedule downloaded directly from the cable company.

Two years later I can report that the DVR’s number of deficiencies borders on the absurd. Here are some highlights:

The schedule search requires you to know the day of the show you’re interested in

The schedule the DVR downloads often does not reflect the schedule that’s broadcast

The DVR sometimes just “forgets” a recording schedule you’ve configured for a particular show

If you’re watching in delay a show as its being recorded the DVR resets you to the start of the show when the show ends

The DVR doesn’t consistently remember where you were watching when you pause a recorded show you and later resume

There are only three forwarding speeds and no way to skip forward, making it painfully slow to get to a particular point in a show

When you’re watching a show the DVR announces, for no good reason, when it’s about to start recording a show on another station

There’s no audible feedback on menu navigation or selection and the lag when navigating the menu can result in you entering input that, when processed, causes you to miss what you’re after

I could go on. I discovered most of these problems within a few days of usage, but gave Time Warner the benefit of the doubt, expecting rough edges on new software and looking forward to automatic updates. The updates have never come and I long ago became convinced that they never will.

Time Warner is delivering consumers the bare minimum solution, which is probably the cheapest one they could find. They’re able to get away with it because most cable subscribers have never used another DVR and are therefore ignorant of what DVR software should provide them.

This is a great example of what happens to consumers when there’s a lack of real competition in a marketplace. Go TiVo!

Originally by Mark Russinovich on 3/28/2005 11:42:00 PM
Migrated from original Sysinternals.com/Blog