I love gadgets and technology and cool new stuff, but I don’t have HDTV.

Why?

This is why.

But the biggest problem is now we have 17 different boxes to power on to watch TV, and they have to be powered on in a certain order and with a certain remote control. And running Windows as the core OS of a PVR is just lunacy: I don’t want to deal with the blue screen of death, or spyware, or not having enough RAM to run my TV – I want it to just work. One night, my wife watched for several uncomfortable minutes as I tried to play a DVD on the HP PVR – there was something wrong with the disc, and eventually we gave up and watched it on one of our laptops in bed. All the while, she is mumbling how life has gotten so complicated that she can’t even operate our TV anymore and what is she supposed to do when I am not around to provide the necessary tech support?

Because when I upgrade to HDTV, I want a nice clean simple system that integrates at least three key functionalities with a minimum of boxes. That’s one box, btw, besides the actual TV itself, to do the following:

1. TV
2. DVD
3. PVR

Whether the TV is satellite, cable, terrestrial or something else, I don’t care. I don’t want 5 boxes with 5 million wires. I don’t want a rat’s nest. I don’t want a living room server room. I don’t want mess. I don’t want complexity.

When someone builds that, let me know.

Tags: HDTV, TV, PVR, home theater, david strom, john koetsier