vendredi 21 octobre 2016

Tivo: your approach to OTA lineup is broken please fix it

Hopefully someone with a clue from Tivo is reading this:

Tivo handles OTA channels like this:

1. User supplies zip code.
2. Box queries Tivo mothership for list of channel records pertaining to that zip.
3. Box scans actual RF signals present on antenna input.
4. Box joins #2 and #3 USING ONLY THE PHYSICAL CHANNEL FIELD to present flattened list of "channels" and asks the user to select the subset that are correct.

The list always wrong in that it will present all the Virtual Channels for which there is a Physical Channel in the received signal set, regardless of whether the ident string matches or not. So you end up with channels that you don't receive in the list, with the task to figure out which is which.

But for some users (like me) it gets much worse because the list fetched in #2 can be wrong (e.g. missing channels that are receivable from your location).

In that case, even though the box is receiving the channel(s) perfectly well in "antenna strength" UI, there is no way to get the channel into the roster for viewing or recording.

The solution to this problem (which the user has to figure out after days of reading Internet forum posts) is to ask Tivo to add the missing channels.

They sometimes do this (mine were added a few months back).
They sometimes randomly delete them again (mine were two months back).
They sometimes never bother to respond to the lineup request ticket (still waiting..)

The whole design is totally broken and wrong imho.

It should work like this:

1. Box asks user for ZIP.
2. Box downloads receivable channel set from mothership.
3. Box performs RF scan.
4. Box joins the downloaded list #2 with the received channels #3 USING THE IDENT AND PHYSICAL CHANNEL FIELDS.
5. Box now knows for sure what is what in the set of RF channels it has picked up.
6. Box also knows if it has picked up "alien" channels that are not in the set fetched in #2.
7. Box can inform user of this situation and allow cool stuff such as offer to fetch adjacent ZIP data sets to see if those channels are present there, or punt to support, or punt to web UI to fix the problem from publically available listing services.

/end{rant}


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