I have received a Rogers Cable personal video recorder (PVR), a Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8000. I’ve got it for a month for free to evaluate for accessibility.
For a Major Canadian Broadcaster, I had previously written a report on accessibility of video-on-demand services, for which you need either a satellite dish or a digital cable box. (My conclusions were not the usual ones.) This Rogers PVR is a digital cable box with a somewhat primitive TiVo manqué inside. You can record TV shows on the machine’s hard drive. It’s not the real thing – only those damned Americans, and the Brits, get TiVo – but it’s close to the real thing.
I am not writing a report for Rogers. I’m evaluating ’er in public, right here. (I’m not getting paid.) I’m at a bit of a disadvantage since, by definition, I haven’t used a real TiVo. I assume, then, that many of my complaints will carry a taint of “Well, if the real TiVo does this, too, then the whole concept is fucked.” Which possibly it is.
I’ve had the machine for a week and already I don’t feel I have enough control over it. It’s constantly recording programs – right now its significantly overbright red LED stares out at me – and it has, on repeated occasions, simply refused to let me watch what I want, for various reasons its software engineers no doubt thought were perfectly consistent with Euclidean logic. At those times, I can do less with the machine than I can with analogue cable and a VCR. (I have digital cable and four VCRs, though fully three of them need servicing.)
I feel like I’m in a science-fiction parody, where some housewife is given a “labour-saving” robot by her husband, only to find herself lugging out the sledgehammer from the basement to smash it to tiny bits later on. Lucille Ball on the assembly line at the chocolate factory.
And accessibility? I don’t have immediate good news. Can you imagine that there are even problems with ordinary closed captioning?
I will write an ongoing series of posts, complete with pictures, which you can follow by selecting the PVR category.