It’s been five years? Oh my how time flies. That said, 2017 does seem like a lifetime ago in so many other ways. But I digress. Back in November of 2017, DIRECTV rolled out its most ambitious update to its user interface in 15 years. Previous UI changes were really just window dressing, but this one was a wholesale change to the way that the interface was presented.
This article was the most popular read on this blog for over a year when it hit, largely because people didn’t terribly like the new interface. If you didn’t have a 60″ TV or larger, and if it wasn’t fully calibrated, you might have found the text small and too thin to read. You might not have liked the grey-on-grey-on-grey screens with no true blacks. Perhaps you mourned the loss of power user features like the ability to mark and delete many things at once.
The hidden power
Looking back, what wasn’t being said at that time was that the new menus represented a hidden power. While previous menus were rendered fairly manually and relied on screen captures for menu backgrounds, the new menus used common web tools. This meant, at least in theory, that they could be updated quickly and show more complex content. It also meant that the menus would never be ported back to older receivers. The new method took more processing power.
The promise of quicker updates hasn’t really come to pass, but the new menus have enabled richer interactive content for special events and a vastly improved Music Choice system. That’s something anyway. More importantly, the whole system paved the way for the eventual consolidation of DIRECTV’s satellite and streaming products. Yeah, I know. We’re still waiting for that too. But hey, it’s only been five years.
Hitting the controversy head on
DIRECTV did revise the menus twice in the coming year, making text larger and thicker. They fixed some of the little inconsistencies. But, they didn’t really listen to the power users. Folks like me asked for some of the functions to be put back. They also asked that there be a setting for smaller TVs that showed fewer lines in the guide and one for larger TVs that showed more. In the end though, I and others just went with the flow. It didn’t affect the experience that much.
Five years on
Five years on, I would like to see some change to the user experience. I wouldn’t mind seeing the DIRECTV Stream guide layout come to DIRECTV Satellite. In fact there’s a lot to like about the whole DIRECTV Stream experience on the C71 box, based as it is on Google TV. Will we see a Google TV-based Genie Client? I don’t know, but I can tell you that the changes made in 2017 mean it’s technically possible. And possible … is better than impossible.
