I’m 26 years old and have been happily partnered for just over six years.  My partner and I live a largely bachelor lifestyle, which means we have a lot of technology in the house.  We use Mac OS X, we play video games, and we love Blu-ray.¹  We’ve been iPod owners since the first generation.  In short, we’re used to having some cool toys.

It has been immensely pleasing to watch these products mature.  Today’s iPod touch bears very little resemblance to the original hard-disk, Firewire- and Mac-only iPod.  Today’s PlayStation makes the original look as dated as the Ultra Nintendo 64 made the SNES.

What’s made the journey so fun is the software.  We’ve gone from 8-bit sprites to full-frame, high-framerate imagery.  We flick and tap our phones to use our applications and access our data.  The advancement in user interfaces has been nothing short of extraordinary, and this is just the beginning.

And then we have this fucker:  The Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8300 HD DVR (II Turbo Remix HD Alpha 1). This is the standard HD DVR provided by Cox to its subscribers in the Phoenix metro area.  I’ve used Comcast cable boxes, DirecTV DVRs, and TiVo HD, and this one really takes the cake.  It is pure, unadulterated shit.^2 3

I can’t count the number of times this box has paused in the middle of a program for no discernible reason.  It is indeed very good at recording your programs as scheduled.  Except when it doesn’t.  That’s usually when you realize that it’s 12:15 am, Jon Stewart has been on for 15 minutes, and you’re going to have to wait a day to get your Daily dose.

Then there are the times when it forgets how to prune old programming.  Inevitably the box will begin to whine about “DISK SPACE LOW.”  In our house this means drop everything you’re doing and start deleting old shows immediately.  Waiting isn’t an option, because if you let it go too long you won’t be able to delete anything… because you have no disk space.  Functional issues aside, the UI itself is painfully antiquated.  The text rendering would have looked right at home on the original Nintendo.  The device’s only “advanced” feature is access to Cox’s On Demand programming.  Accessing the service requires the box to go into a special mode where it seems to gain some abilities.  Unfortunately, reliably streaming HD programming isn’t one of them.

Many have had a similar experience, and it’s no surprise that the culprits regularly come from large companies with municipal monopolies.  A robust competitive environment is what leads to things like iPhones and PS3s.  Remove competition and you end up with the Scientific Atlanta cable box Cox deems good enough to serve me content for which I pay exorbitantly so I can access roughly six channels regularly.⁴

We need some competition in this space, and we need it badly.  Otherwise we’ll be stuck with these crappy UIs for a long time to come.  We deserve better.

1. DRM sucks, but right now there is no other practical way to get uncompressed 1080p video. ↩
2. I went back to the Scientific Atlanta because Cox’s CableCARDS wouldn’t maintain their authorizations.  This required me to call Cox, and wait a few days so they could send one of their minions to shove a new PCMCIA card in the TiVo – a process I could’ve done when I was five.  After going through this several times, I gave up. ↩
3. I realize this is only my second post on this blog, but get used to cursing.  I’m an unabashed George Carlin Wannabe. ↩
4. CNN, NBC, HBO, Showtime, Comedy Central, and Bravo ↩