A few days ago I had a DirecTV HR23 box go belly-up. I awoke one morning to the smell of melted plastic. I didn’t open the box, so I don’t know what went wrong, but it was obviously something bad. Despite having no LED lights on the front panel there was still power – although it wouldn’t even try to boot up. But, as long as the power cord was plugged in, the smell and a chirping sound (which probably was from the hard drive) continued.
DirecTV has always had excellent customer service, at least in my experiences. This was no exception – they were ready to send me a new HR23 via priority shipping. The box arrived in two days, along with a paid label to send back the old DVR.
Setup is simple – just plug in the old connections that are already in place. Of course, you need to call DirecTV to activale the box, but that isn’t a big deal either. It’s after that step that you see where DirecTV, and every other DVR (as far as I know), are lacking.
What do these cable and satellite companies need to add? Backing up all of your recorded shows would be nice, but we have seen how difficult a netwrked DVR has been for Cablevision. What I noticed when re-setting-up my HR23 was a glaring lack for backup of personal settings. I had to, once again, add all of my season passes, set my video preferences, re-enable my network settings, etc.
Is it too much to ask that all of these personal settings be backed up by the provider? Or at east that they provide a path for backing them up locally to a networked PC? After all, the HR23 has ethernet and shows up on our home network. It seems like a simple update to add backup of personal settings. More importnantly to the providers, it doesn’t seem like anything that would cause them to end up in court.
This seems like a minor addition to the software package of any TV provider. Still, it doestn’t seem to be mentioned by anyone as an update that is on the roadmap. I know that I would seriously consider moving to one that decides to add it.
I’ve been experimenting for some time with connecting computers to televisions, along with a variety of other set-top boxes. I’m now at a point where I’ve begun to draw a few conclusions.
Sometimes things no one ever thought of simply seem to come together. Services and devices end up being used to do things the individual inventors and designers couldn’t have imagined.
