DirecTV Doing Its Customers No Favor, Again

Some may remember that I reported upcoming upgrades for owners of DirecTiVos in the late months of last year, that were to have taken place by now. I was merely reporting what had been presented to the public, not knowing it was all to change. Some would say we were lied to, and I would agree. It appears that for all the benefits of DirecTV, the purveyors are still bowing to pressure from the media content makers (or are they – could this simply be a money grab by DirecTV, and a very convenient shift of blame? It will be interesting to see if the same thing happens to those who have DVR units connected to Dish Network.)

 poor remote, poor feature list, lackluster performance – the advantage that DirecTV had with the DVR service is eroding from great to merely good

This time around it has been announced that owners of the markedly inferior DirectDVR units will no longer, after April 15, be able to store downloaded pay-per-view items. After a period of 24 hours, the content will simply be wasted space on the hard drive. This is sad, for no matter who is doing it, it shows that the whole point of Digital Rights Management is simply greed. It is not enough for a person to pay for programming, knowing that on the DirectDVR it is locked down tight so that there is no way it can be easily removed from the original drive it was recorded on – now the purchase is only good for 24 hours. If something happens that causes the family to not be able to view the purchased content within that time, too bad. Greed, nothing else.

 these units are not as  glamorous as the DirectDVRs, and the peanut remote is ugly, but functionality is orders of magnitude better

It is already bad enough that DirecTV customers must endure the spectacular failure that is the successor to the DirecTiVo, and those of us who have both are reminded daily of the bad programming of the newer units, as well as the total lack of ergonomic considerations.

further reading an be done here 

-