Verizon FIOS Cable Guide Blows Chunks Big Time
Let's start with the Guide's appearance. It looks like someone with a lot of money and absolutely no sense decided to decorate their house by plastering pictures on every wall and statues in every corner. In other words, in their effort to be cute and flashy, they've created a mess. It's hard to read, and has too many distractions.
But, if it was only the appearance that blew chunks, I would be fine with it. After all, I can get used to an ugly design. The fact that it is a bit harder to read would be a pain, but I could deal.
Unfortunately, the appearance was the masterstroke of a channel guide that is littered with usability issues and bugs. It is absolutely horrible.
The most annoying bug is that the favorites list can sometimes lose the HD channels. I start out at the top of the list, and it doesn't loop over to the HD channels, forcing me to scroll down. Then, I finally get to the bottom and it cuts off before the HD channels display, forcing me to scroll back up, at which point the HD channels 'magically' appear. Very annoying.
Perhaps just as annoying is the fact that clicking on the favorites button doesn't start the favorites list at the channel I am currently watching. Since I mainly watch the HD channels, this forces me to scroll through the list every time I want to change from one of my local channels to the NFL Network or one of the other HD channels.
I quickly gave up using favorites to navigate to my channels. It's simply too poorly programmed and too annoying. I use it for browsing when I don't know what I want to watch, but for getting from point A to point B, I am forced to use the main channel guide.
Another very annoying 'bug' -- and I put bug in single quotes because it wouldn't surprise me if some religious zealot at Verizon did it on purpose -- is that exiting from On Demand doesn't return me to the channel I was on when I entered On Demand. Instead, it takes me to some Christian music channel. Thanks, Verizon, I got the message: People who want to convert you to Christianity are very annoying and don't know how to program.
And I don't want to leave without mentioning that the On Demand menu is pretty horrible too. Not only does it waste a bunch of space trying to mimic the start button in Windows by displaying the menu categories I am not on anymore, but it is frequently slow, and there's no visual display of when it is busy doing something else. Get a clue: If you are going to rip something off from Windows, rip off the freaking hourglass.
Here's something I will never understand: Text compresses at a 10 to 1 rate. This means, when transferring text across a connection, the speed at which the text gets to its destination is ten times faster than the connection speed. And yet, somehow, it takes Verizon FIOS about ten days to create a list containing thirty movies and their descriptions. If I was on a website, this would pop up instantly. But, somehow, Verizon manages to slow even this down.
It's bad enough that America is moving away from good customer service, do we have to plop quality into the toilet as well?
| Tags: Verizon FIOS cable | Posted by Dan on 11/20/07 |
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