# Verizon Fios Media Guide Upgrade



## Anthony (Oct 5, 2006)

*Moto HD-DVR + Verizon Fios IMG upgrade*

First, some background:
I have Verizon Fios for high speed, phone, and TV. One of the things I liked about it was the Motorola HD-DVR. It's a very reliable unit, great picture quality, HDMI and component ouputs. It was a huge improvement over the Scientific Atlanta box that the cable company gave me. 

Turns out a lot of the functionality of the box was with Verizon's menu and Interactive Media Guide software on the box. They announced they were completely redoing the menus and functionality to accommodate customer's feedback. So without further adieu . . . (the original message below)

Well, it finally happened after much hype, phone calls warning me, and anticipation: the new Verizon Fios Interactive Media Guide (IMG) installed on my Moto HD-DVR.

The one hour review: it sucks. Bad. 

Features that used to be really easy to find are lost in a maze of menus. Stopping a show that you watched used to take you to a menu that allowed deletion. Not anymore. The favorites channel list doesn't "loop" back to the front when you get to the bottom. If you have only 10 channels this probably isn't a problem. We flagged 50 (it used to make for easier scrolling by bypassing the spanish, music, and movie channels).

Also, the new format is easier to use with their new remote. I called to see if I could swap for the new remote, since it has a skip-ahead feature. $7+s/h, which doesn't seem like much, but when you look at the features and layout, the new remote is pretty much required to use the new IMG intuitively. So I said pass on that.

Another "favorites" problem: if you select a channel like USA, it double selects both the low and high channel number (50 and 500). Presumably one is for the analog only boxes and the other for digital, but it clutters up the list something fierce, and adding one always adds the other.

Other than listing the description with the channel info and transparent menus, I see nothing good from this upgrade.

The major downside is: there's nothing you can do about it! 

Verizon will be getting a letter echoing what I mentioned here. I hope to at least get a free remote out of it to skip commercials more efficiently, but at most I hope they have some way of reverting to the old setup.

Progress isn't always positive!


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