I’ve had a a TiVo Series 2 for years. Its user experience for selecting, recording and watching TV shows left everything else in the dust. So when TiVo teamed up with Amazon a year or two ago to offer video-on-demand movies and TV shows via TiVo, I had high hopes.

These were quickly dashed. The Amazon VoD UI embedded in TiVo is unresponsive, clumsy, cumbersome and unpleasant—everything the TiVo UI itself is not. When one chooses “Video on Demand” from the TiVo menu, one arrives at a menu screen featuring something like 8 different VoD vendors whose delivery medium is TiVo. Never mind the fact that as a movie watcher, I could give a flying fork whether “Jaman Movies and Shorts” or “Disney Video” or “Blockbuster” or “Amazon Video on Demand” supplies the title I want to watch; as a customer, I’m focused on content, not content vendors.

Yet amazingly, not only is the TiVo UI organized by something as meaningless as vendor, but each of the vendor submenus takes you to a different, yet uniformly awful, user interface. Here are some misfeatures common to all of them:

• Each button press on the TiVo remote has a UI response time between 700 and 1500ms. Yes, that’s right, it can take more than a second to get any visual or auditory feedback that your button-press actually did anything. This is far above the established thresholds for perceptual causality (~100ms). In contrast, when using the “native” TiVo UI, it feels snappy and responsive.
• Each VoD source has a different menu-driven UI for search, “top titles”, browse by genre, etc. The user has a simple goal: “I want to find (or browse) movies.” Yet each submenu has a different structure, for no defensible reason. As a user, what do I care which of the vendors is providing the content?
• The GUI is not only entirely textual, it is designed in such a way that less than 50% of the already-scarce screen real estate is actually devoted to browsing. The rest is devoted to TiVo templated elements and blather from the VoD vendor about how thrilled I should be that I had the wisdom to select them.

The UI is, in short, astonishingly bad.  It is all the more frustrating because this truly awful UI, which makes me want to hurl the remote at the screen, emanates from the same device that gave us the effortlessly superior TiVo UI.

What happened?

Bottom line: when it comes to video on demand, TiVo has provided an unresponsive, inconsistent, confusing and non-thought-out GUI in which various competing vendors of VoD media fight for your eyeballs with unattractive, unintuitive, arbitrarily-different GUIs that violate every basic GUI tenet, including those to which the original TiVo GUI hews so faithfully and well.  In contrast, AppleTV, for all its bashing, has a nicely-thought-out, consistent, aesthetically appealing GUI that does the one thing you want to do: find the damn movie easily, and start watching it as soon as possible. The search interface is fast and responsive; the user experience is,well, Apple; and you can usually start watching movies within 1-2 minutes of clicking “Buy”. (The last time I used Amazon VoD on TiVo to watch a 30-minute TV sitcom episode, I had to wait 20 minutes before I could start watching, even though my TiVo enjoys access to exactly the same broadband network as my AppleTV. How is 20 minutes “video on demand”? I could have made a trip to the local video store and been back in less time than that.)

Shame on you, TiVo.  DVR hardware is commodity; what had set you apart was your UI. As you continue to add vendors to your hideous VoD user experience, you will start running out of feet in which to shoot yourselves.

We have a 2nd-gen TiVo DVR as well as an AppleTV.

TiVo is widely and deservedly praised for its outstanding user experience. But in the video-on-demand department, it’s so pathetically inferior to AppleTV that it doesn’t appear to have been designed in the same decade. The great guys and gals who designed the original TiVO UI must have left the back door open when it comes to the VoD UI.

If I select the TiVo “video on demand” menu option from the top-level menu, I get six submenus: Amazon Video on Demand, Walt Disney Studios, Jaman Movies and Shorts, Browse Free Videos, Music Videos from Music Choice, and Home Movies By One True Media. As a user, what the hell do I choose? Why should the distributor of a piece of video be a first-order user experience choice? Wouldn’t most users be more likely to know, say, the name of the movie or its actors rather than the name of the middleman distributor that happens to control the distribution rights for that piece of video via TiVo?

Among those six choices, the submenus are all different. If I choose Amazon Video on Demand, I get choices like Top Rentals, Top Categories & Special Deals, Browse Entire Catalog, Search, and FAQ. The Walt Disney Studios menu item reveals Most Popular, New Arrivals, Browse, and About CinemaNow (whatever that is; the term doesn’t appear elsewhere in the UE). Even in menu items where Search is allowed, it appears at a different spot in every menu. None of the menus or submenus have anything other than a text-only, one-screen-at-a-time interface. It’s like using Gopher before we had the World Wide Web.

Finally, to add insult to injury, the couple of times I’ve actually purchased TV episodes from Amazon Video on Demand, I have to wait an amount of time that is a large fraction of the total playing time before I can start watching. To watch a 30-minute TV sitcom episode, I had to wait over 20 minutes before I could hit Play. Look, I understand about buffering, but AppleTV gets this right–why can’t TiVo?

How does this compare to AppleTV’s user experience? The top level choices there are “Movies” and “TV Shows”. Each choice gets me to an attractively-arranged screen of box-cover graphics with titles (vs. TiVo’s 1980’s text-only interface), or I can search either movies or TV shows. The user experience is identical for both movies and TV shows. If I happen to have rented or purchased movies or TV shows in my iTunes library, I see those as well. I can watch the trailer of any movie instantly and for free. If I choose to purchase or rent a movie or TV show, I can typically start watching within 1 to 3 minutes, in HD and digital surround if available for that movie. Amazon VoD is 1- or 2-channel sound and standard-def NTSC video.

Yes, AppleTV has a far smaller selection of content than Amazon, and the price per rental item is a bit higher. But using AppleTV is a joy, whereas using the TiVo/Amazon UE feels like I’ve been transported back to Gopher in the late 1980’s. Shame on TiVo for allowing this dreck to invade an otherwise excellently designed product. It’s frustrating that TiVo, a device that otherwise has an excellent UE and is by its nature an Internet appliance, falls so embarrassingly flat when it comes to a UE for video-on-demand that isn’t even usable, let alone compelling. Get a clue, guys–the iPod has 85%+ market share for a reason.