There is a rage brewing in my apartment, and it’s Comcast’s fault. There is only one DVR, but three roommates. It is easier to share a bathroom than a DVR. Recordings get deleted more often than we take out the garbage. The result? DVR-guments.
Comcast’s solution is a DVR for every room and more money, but sharing a single DVR isn’t the problem. It’s the software.
There is one master list for all recordings. One list for multiple users. Short of calling my roommates at work to ask if they’ve watched the March 11th Daily Show, I’m left to delete recordings blindly or leave them to pile up until we’re forced to convene a DVR death panel. Neither is appealing.
There’s a simple fix. Change the software to allow multiple users. Let the first menu after “my DVR” be the usernames. If we each have our own list of recordings, we can freely delete what we’ve already seen, while the software keeps shows on hard drive until they’ve been deleted from every user’s list.
Maybe TiVo already does this. I’ve never used one. But I can tell you that my Comcast DVR does not. It is unforgivable. This is not groundbreaking programming. Adding one additional menu is as simple as copy and paste.
Comcast, do your part to end domestic DVR-guments. Otherwise we’ll be forced to stop blaming each other, and start blaming you.
Until next week,
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Jonathan Rozen
I love when non-programmers say a feature is simple to add.
ReplyDeleteThat said i think the current solution of "record the last 5 episodes" is the way to go. Who wants to deal with deletion maintenance?
It may be a large programming task for you or I to do alone in our free time, but for a giant company like Comcast, it is a minor assignment.
ReplyDelete