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Interactive TV: Blech

Author:   Matt Deatherage  
Posted: 3/23/02; 1:41:23 PM
Topic: Interactive TV: Blech
Msg #: 139 (top msg in thread)
Prev/Next: 138/140
Reads: 2285

So I turned off my Dish Network receiver the other night in preparation of reconnecting my TiVo (yes, that story will come soon -- it's working again, absolutely no thanks to Maxtor and its completely incompetent support department), and while it was off, Dish Network downloaded some new programs to the box. This time I got "Dish Home," the new "interactive" TV system they've promised for everyone.

Blech!

First, Dish has this completely stupid habit of changing how you leave any specific channel. If you accidentally go to a pay-per-view or locked channel, you have to press Channel Up or Channel Down to get out of it. If you go to "Dish Weather" interactive weather, you have to press "Guide" to leave. Dish Home is on channel 100, and you have to press "0" on its main menu to leave. It's worse because channel 100 is the default channel for remote controller things like TiVo; it took me forever to figure out why I couldn't get it to change channels (it was on channel 100 and the "up/down" codes didn't work).

Once I got that far, I had a menu with five choices. "Customer Support" is empty and "coming soon." The "Entertainment" choice offers a few games by Zap2It, but you're supposed to pay $5 a month for them. The only one I could bring myself to try was "Bowling," where I was asked to use buttons on the remote control to position an arrow for a bowling ball, then to pick its vector (first the direction, then the thrust). Of course, the Dish remote is always slow, so I get a selection from about half a second after I picked the moving target. And for $5 I could get more of that!

The "Entertainment" section is innocuous stuff to watch on TV with an equally abysmal interface. "Lifestyles" is a euphemism for "horoscope." All are horribly sluggish -- it takes 30 seconds or longer to enter and exit both the games and the entertainment sections.

I know TiVo is wanting to add games to its receivers sometime this year, but if they're anything like this, my attitude is "get them out of my way." If the system responded when you press remote buttons, or didn't take forever to change screens, or even worked consistently, it might be worth not completely avoiding. But not now.


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