I thought Comcast was bad...

[Hi Ho]

Until I went on vacation last week and experienced Cox cable's HD cable box UI.

I was on vacation in Scottsdale for the past two weeks and while I spent virtually no time watching TV I could not help but notice how horribly bad the UI on the cable box looked. Those pictures are not out of focus!

Comcast has a pretty poor UI here in Washington and Dish and DirecTV are light years ahead of them but this is just atrocious. So much wasted space, not even widescreen.

I am constantly amazed at how little effort seems to go into the cable box UI's. I guess since they have a monopoly and the masses don't bother to even look into other options they just don't have to care.

 

[joshus77]

Agreed! I hate the Comcast UI I have. If you have looked at the Ipad Xfinity TV app it shows they have the ability of a producing a good UI. They will keep their crappy analog UI look to high def cable until on-screen is out dated and your UI will be all ipad and smart phones.

Just my thoughts on it...

 

[Grador]

I was on a trip to San Diego this week and was reminded of how happy I am to have FiOS. The analog video stream for NBC on time warner was so full of artifacts that if I was informed that they had downloaded the videos off the internet from someone who had encoded them like youtube did videos in 2006 I wouldn't have questioned it.

I am also very happy not to have that UI, it really is terrible.

 

[Rubicon_Joey]

I don't really get it. It can't be that hard to make a clean GUI and yet most every cable company I have seen has a crappy GUI that looks like it was (and probably was) made 10 years ago.

 

[BMXTRIX]

With only four or five shows listed, and a SD interface. Even worse, in the DC area at least, one of the cable providers has advertisements at the bottom of the guide that you have to scroll over to even get to the next page.

I signed up for FIOS the day that it became available to me, and I may end up going with DirecTV if I have to in the future just to have a better user experience.

 

[agarwalro]

I;m not condoning the lack of crisp graphics or usability of the Guide UI, but, it is all a bandwidth game and the UI is lowest priority... I'd like to see Comcast get rid of the On Demand feed or at least compress it a little more and give some bandwidth love to the Guide.

 

[lsiberian]

Watching TV on vacation. Why even go lol?

 

[Hi Ho]

I;m not condoning the lack of crisp graphics or usability of the Guide UI, but, it is all a bandwidth game and the UI is lowest priority... I'd like to see Comcast get rid of the On Demand feed or at least compress it a little more and give some bandwidth love to the Guide.

It has nothing to do with bandwidth. The UI is rendered on the cable box. It's all about the firmware in the box.

Watching TV on vacation. Why even go lol?

Haha I didn't watch any TV. I was staying with family and in the evening they would be watching TV and I could not help but notice the horrible UI. I was soaking up the beautiful evening weather outside.

In fact, the lack of recordings on my DVR when I got home has made me rethink that fact that I pay almost $100/month for TV and I've been looking into other options.

 

[BoredSysAdmin]

Majority of Cablevision boxes have the same crappy interface. I spoke with their REP and he told me they have no plans to update it.
The only bright spot is they have a beta program - DVD+ - which is DVR service, but the recording takes place on their side, not at your home. The boxes made by Samsung and according to rep have much nicer ui.

The Beta portion of is still very true - as far as the CV's DVR+ experience still laggy and buggy

FIOS might be available soon in my building, but will have to consider it since I pay very little for my current CV Boost package brings me actual speeds up-to 64 Mbis down (64mbis is sustained during off-peak hours, rush hour drops to 4/5mbis )

 

[lsiberian]

It has nothing to do with bandwidth. The UI is rendered on the cable box. It's all about the firmware in the box.



Haha I didn't watch any TV. I was staying with family and in the evening they would be watching TV and I could not help but notice the horrible UI. I was soaking up the beautiful evening weather outside.

In fact, the lack of recordings on my DVR when I got home has made me rethink that fact that I pay almost $100/month for TV and I've been looking into other options.

I ditched cable years ago and replaced it with Netflix. I recently added Hulu Plus and honestly the picture quality is pretty solid. It's not a perfect OTA picture, but as good as the cable I've seen.

 

[agarwalro]

It has nothing to do with bandwidth. The UI is rendered on the cable box. It's all about the firmware in the box.

Doh! Did not think it through.

What about devoting minimum processing power to rendering of the UI?