the soupmenu

Here’s how I saw the final moment of American idol this year…

Yes, kinda comical. But I was not the only one. By a quick survey of friends, it seems a decent percentage of people had the same problem. Basically if you DVRed the show with Comcast or Brighthouse and watched it more than 15 minutes after the show ended, this is the experience you had. What a failure of service and product by these companies. While I believe Brighthouse has gotten better at having an up-to-date menu system, I constantly have misinformation now that I’m at a house with Comcast. These companies need to develop an active system where the DVR receives a notification when the show is complete so that when a show runs late, all is not lost.

You would think this would be a priority to these companies as the experience of missing the climax of a show due to bad interactive design is horrible. Immediately it has people jumping up and down cussing about your product and service. If that’s not enough bad marketing, think about where the viewer will then go to see the end of the show…..YOUTUBE. The biggest threat for digital cable is online video, and here digital cable first gives a horrible experience, and then immediately sends their customers to their main competition to remedy the situation.

Here is the full ending of the show…thank you youtube for a great experience.

Mike’s TV is broken…not broken in a classic wiimote attack way…but instead at random intervals a black screen pops over 40% of the screen with a random line of what I can only expect to be alien code for ‘stop watching the magic lose’. The only way to get rid of the box is by turning the TV on and off. Once the box shows it’s face…it likes to stay around for upwards of 15 minutes and just as many many reboots.

The wonderful crew at Olevia decided that their TV needed a welcome screen with their logo as big as can be.

Branding can be wonderful when your product works reliably, but for those outliers with broken mechanics it can backfire. Now every time I see that logo I think about how crappy of a TV this is with such a silly and unfixable problem (from the consumer side)

With the classic 10-1 bad impression rule, Olevia has a lot of make up to do in my mind to be seen as a quality brand.

*update…problem solved. A handy-dandy google search taught me that the box is shown because of closed captioning. The TV is improperly displaying the closed captioning sent from Comcast. My impression of Olevia stands.

there are tons of advantages and great outcomes from web2.0.

I’d just like to point out a personal one. I did the simple task of embedding a flickr slide show into my info page. With not even two lines of code I instantly have a micro-portrait of my life. I know this will not have the impact for other people, but for me it’s great to look through the memories of the last ~3 years in a matter of minutes. Highs, lows, simple, complex, sad, exuberant…all there because of one simple tag.

just imagine the personal mashups in the upcoming years where you’ll be able to port messages, news, friends, pictures, and music all into an instant multimedia portrait of your life.

here it is for those who are bored: