GlitchVo and UlticrashTV
Should software companies and computer companies really be making television devices?
“Those in the PC world have been conditioned to expect that things don’t work out, but consumer electronics is a whole different world,” Snowden said. “People expect things to work on a TV.”
Apparently TiVo and UltimateTV systems are having problems (constant rebooting among other things), and consumer electronics buyers aren’t happy with them. And they shouldn’t be… for the longest time, the only thing you had to do in order to get a TV to work was plug the damn thing in, plug the coaxial cable into it, and viola… a working TV. But these computer-based TV systems developers (TiVo runs on Linux, and UltimateTV probably runs some sort of NT kernel, I’m expecting, seeing as how it’s MS-owned).. don’t understand that there is a zero tolerance in the entertainment/consumer electronics market for glitches. Something MUST be perfect before it leaves R&D and goes into production, because customers simply won’t tolerate the ‘update’ schema that computer users have been used to for so long. I’m not saying that updates are bad for computers, they are asked to do a million different things every day. But a television or TV system has a very limited and specialized routine to follow. A ‘glitch’ isn’t an accepted event in that world.