FiOS TV 2.0 hits Northern Virginia!

Well I now have the new Interactive Media Guide (aka FiOS TV 2.0). My inital impressions are that it looks great but is basically the same interface as before just a little prettier. It appears that they used a "blade" style interface a la the XBox 360. The interface is definately one of the nicest DVR interfaces, outside the TiVo. However, it does suffer from some rather annoying deficiencies. Ironically many of these are things lost from the old Interactive Media Guide (1.0).

1. No way to limit the Channels in the Guide: With Tivo and IMG 1.0 you could turn of channels you don't want to see in the channel listing. I typically turn off the foreign language channels, shopping channels, and music channels I don't care for. However, I have not been able to find out how to remove channels. There are some nice pre-defined filters: All Channels, HD Channels, and Favorites. Removing u nwanted channels also helps shrink the database and makes searching much faster and reduces mistakes when selecting programs to records. Its much harder to accidentally record the spanish version of the Discovery channel.

2. The filters are crippled: You can not modify the filters and the HD Channels filter is broken. When you select the HD Channel filter it does not show the local channels.

3. The Favorites feature is now annoying and not useful. When I first realized that I couldn't turn a channel off my first instinct was to just make all the channels I want my favorites and they always use the Favorites filter. Heck there is even a "Favorites" button one the remote. However I eventually figured out that if you pick the english TLC as a favorite you automatically get the spanish TLC as a favorite. I don't speak spanish, so I don't want to have to scroll through those channels in my guide!

4. HD Channel and Favorites Filter jump you to the beginning: Another annoying thing about the "Favorites" Filter is that it jumps you to the beginning of the guide and not the channel you are on! The HD Channel Filter also suffers from this problem but since there aren't that many channels its not as annoying.

5. HD Channel and Favorites Filter don't wrap around. Since these filters jump you to the beginning of the guide, ie lowest channel number, you would think that you could just go up and the channels will wrap around and you will be at the highest number but ohhh no! That would make way to much since.

I have only had the new IMG 2.0 for a few days so I'm sure I'll find more to like and dislike so I will continue to post on this topic. In this post I have focused on what I don't like. In my next post I will try and focus on what I do. There is a lot to the new IMG 2.0 and much of the good stuff is pretty deep in the UI. I personally think that the UI is too deep an needs to be simplified. In my opinion that is the key to TiVo's success.