My family won’t adapt to anything in the living room with a keyboard and mouse, and getting a reliable remote on any PC based solution is often problematic.
But Windows 7 is gone, and so is the TiVo Slide remote.
Turned out after I had already bought all that stuff due to flakiness that it was just some bad RAM that, really, was overkill - I could have just taken out the bad sticks and kept on rocking, in which case it probably would still be our DVR.
A bit convoluted I guess but it's still under 1k loc so w/e.
Or what about the Steam Controller? It's UX is similar to some nicer smart TV interfaces.
The real solution is you build an app that is nice for your family to use and just tells the boxes what to play. Sure hope your family doesn't use iPhones!
Cable TV wasn't perfect, of course, but it was pretty damn good, especially in allowing everybody to have access to just about every show that was produced.
That the "replacement" model is disappointing and a worse experience, really shouldn't come as a surprise.
These days, you'd have to pay me $20+ per hour to watch cable TV.
I did have basic cable for a few years in the early 2000s, and I did enjoy watching Star Trek TNG reruns. Because there wasn't any good alternative back then in the dark ages.
Netflix has produced a few decent shows but most of its stuff is "targeted towards morons" or "pure garbage that insults my intelligence" - Love is Blind, Is it Cake.
Commercials arent great but they are passive - easy to ignore. Much rather have a 3-minute commercials break where I can go to the bathroom or check my phone than having to actively scroll for 90 seconds switching from app to app and navigating their awful interfaces to get back to the show I was watching the other day.
But that's just me - glad you like our new television overlords, they certainly love anyone bashing cable tv!
I expect there to be more aggregate junk on Netflix just because there is no floor: networks have only 168 hours a week to fill, while Netflix can throw anything at all on the pile.
But it doesn't matter, since unlike the networks, they're all available at once. If something insults your intelligence, you don't watch it.
> But it doesn't matter... they're all available at once
I'm sorry but streaming everything is not a panacea. The spigot of worthwhile content is not endless. Ok great you binge-watched the entire season of Stranger Things over two nights. What will you watch tomorrow? And the day after? How much of the show do you actually remember? You lose out on the fun of discussing each individual episode with like-minded people, the wondering about how the next episode will resolve the last episodes drama, maybe watching an episode a second time and catching some additional detail.
I can assure you that watching great television - Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Larry Sanders Show, Homicide: Life on the Street - one episode per week is vastly superior to binge-watching it, even if it feels inconvenient in the moment. (Of course this is with the convenience of DVR so you can time-shift occasionally)
We've rebuilt cable boxes, but somehow they're even shittier than before.