Tag DVR

With Six You Get a Recording of Eggroll

Michael Leave a comment

“Why not?” the ads for Verison’s Fios ask when the requisite adorable kid wants to know why he can’t record all of the cartoons at one time and save them all to watch in whatever room he wants to.  Almost the same question that the Comcast Xfinity and Dish TV Hopper ad actors come up with before somebody voices over that they too can record 8, 12, or 15 programs at once (depending on which premium package you buy into), keeping up to 2,000 hours of recorded content (they all seem to agree on that number), with the ability to start watching in one room and finishing off in another (that’s no big deal but they all want you to believe that it is).

What none of them tell you is that all of their basic DVR package allows you to record only 2 to 4 programs at once and save a mere 50 to 90 hours.  We’d like to tell you how much the basic packages are compared to the upgraded packages but none of the sites had a clear price of the DVR service and equipment rental.  They all had disclaimers that the promotional bundled pricing of the DVR plus other services was good for 6, 12, or 24 months with a 24 month commitment and with additional activation, installation, equipment rental, and regional sports network fees.  Not all providers charged all fees but all providers charged enough fees.

Not being able to determine if we’d want any of these premium packages based on how much they cost (why would anybody want to decide on what, or if, to buy based on price?), we can pretty much say without hesitation that we don’t want any of these premium packages based on principle.  There aren’t 8, 12, or Heaven forbid 15 programs airing at the same time that we’d want to record.  We can’t imagine that it is too often when there are two programs airing at the same time worthy of a quick view let alone a recording.  And who came up with 2,000 hours of savable programming?  That’s over sixteen 2-hour movies – or 66 cartoon episodes for the requisite adorable ad kid that started this discussion.  Wouldn’t he be better off spending 2,000 hours at the neighborhood playground on the monkey bars with some friends?  It seems to be another example of “just because it can be done doesn’t mean that it should be done” except this time someone is charging the American public for the right to excess.

Perhaps that’s what is meant by the “pursuit of happiness.”  If we had to pursue 2,000 hours of quality programming to find happiness that might be a quest that’s never satisfied.

Now that’s what we think. Really. How ‘bout you.

5 x 2,000 = 0

Michael Leave a comment

It was an okay start to the weekend.  It was cold and there was a call for some snow.  But by the time Both of We were in the same house, about 2 inches of that snow had fallen and the other 3 or 4 that was coming was coming quickly.  It seemed, even though there were more than a few destinations to where we could have headed, the sofa and a television would do just fine for this weekend.

When we turned on the set one of the first sights we saw was a commercial for one of the satellite TV programmers’ DVR that can record up to 2,000 hours without losing a single digit out of all those digital files.  Shortly after that was a commercial for another satellite provider’s DVR package that allows you to record up to 5 programs at the same time.  Clearly those guys have more to pick from that the 1,100 channels we had at our remote fingertips.

It’s the time between the Academy Award nominations and the Academy Award recognitions so every channel that had anything among its offerings remotely movie-like would be running Oscar Month specials.  We saw promos for the best movie ever coming to a TV near you before this year’s glittery statuettes are awarded.  Unfortunately it’s hard to get the programmers from American Movie Classics, Turner Classic Movies, Arts and Entertainment, TruTV, Disney, History, BET, Comedy Central, and the Golf Channel to agree on the best movie ever.

We did watch one network’s offering of its idea of the best movie ever (we disagreed) and sometime during the weekend we also watched a couple hockey games, some cooking shows on PBS and on commercial television, WipeOut, lots of syndicatedtwenty-year old situation comedies, a horrible horror film offered at midnight, news, the Puppy Bowl, another movie, and very unusual presentation of an early 1950’s recording of a full orchestra performing all Strauss, all the time.  No Super Bowl but we did watch the commercials on the Internet.

Neither of us has the requisite satellite provider to be able to record up to 2,000 hours of what we watched this weekend.  Fortunately we rarely watch 2,000 hours of television in one sitting.  (Does anybody realize that 2,000 hours of television at 4 hours of television watching per day every day is almost 11 months of TV?)  We tried to figure out what 5 shows we’d record all at the same time and decided we couldn’t find 5 shows that were playing all weekend that were on our “we can’t miss these at any cost” list. The only hour and the only show we might have considered wanting to record was maybe the Johann Strauss concert or possibly one of the cooking shows that had an interesting recipe for pizza dough that neither of us had seen before.  But then on further consideration we decided Strauss had too schizophrenic a style for us and we already have two favorite pizza shops that do it for us.

So it seems that the programmers, both computer and marketing, have managed to violate the Number One Rule of Inventions.  Just because you can, doesn’t mean that you should.   

Now, that’s what we think.  Really.  How ‘bout you?