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kottke.org posts about 'dvr'

The history of the design and manufacture of the TiVo remote control.

Like any remote, the designers were adamant about keeping the remote's button layout as simple as possible. But with the DVR's numerous features, the designers needed to create lots of extra buttons. To keep things straight, each button needed to have a distinctive feel, giving the ability to control the remote without even looking at it, which Newby described as a "key Braille-ability" surprisingly helped by the "blank finger parking spots between keys" that were equally important.

(via waxy)

Jun 22, 2008    tags: tivo design tv dvr

TBS and their annoying interstitial commericials

Last night I was watching a rerun of Family Guy on TBS and right before the show went to commercial, this happened:

See what they did there? They paused the TV show, ran a little mini-commercial for some show that no one cares about, and then returned to the last two seconds of the segment before going to commercial. Jesus Christ. I realize that Time Warner doesn't actually care about the people who watch their shows and that television programs are just the networks' way of getting people to watch advertising, but this is too much. Do these things actually work or just piss people off in droves? Is there some marketing hot dog at Time Warner who thinks that Family Guy viewers want to watch the blue collar comedy stylings of Bill Engvall? I'm sorry that the DVR is ruining your business model, but can you kick the bucket a little more gracefully? (Digg this?)

Jun 4, 2008    tags: tbs tv advertising dvr
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