Comcast makes already mediocre DVR just a bit worse

I can’t confirm the stat (since I’m making it up), but I’ll go out on a limb and say TiVo’s product satisfaction rate probably hovers around 90%.  Echostar’s DVR is generally very well-liked by many of it’s customers.  Heck, even the tiny fraction of Windows Media Center Edition owners who use their PCs as DVRs claim it’s phenomenal.  And then there’s Comcast.

For HDTV DVR services, Comcast uses the Motorola DCT6412 set-top box, a unit that is simply plagued by defects nationwide.  Ask someone who owns this unit, odds are pretty good they’ll talk about their problems at length, and complan how much they hate it.  My friend Ryan was so frustrated by his unit (which is definitely defective) that he blogged about it.

I walked into my living room this morning to find my wife watching TV and when she pulled up the program guide, I noticed I’d lost about 1/8th of my overall screen space to a new “advertisement slot” (photos below).  Worse yet, I’ve lost 2 (of 6) lines of the visible grid area, meaning I have to spend roughly 1/3 longer than before just to scroll through channels.

What a terrible, terrible move.  Here are a few simple ways they could make this marginally better (assuming they won’t get rid of it):

• Reduce the height of the ad to the same height as a grid item, giving me one line back
• Only have it show up once every XX pages
• Use the “top area” where the Comcast logo is instead, since that’s pretty much wasted space already
• Make it slightly bigger, but then let me hide it once I’ve viewed it (it can reappear every XX minutes)

Or just give me the darn TiVo interface already – the one that was announced two years ago. Come on!