I admit I was somewhat confuzzled when I first read Verizon’s FiOS TV email outreach. As, likely, you were while scanning this headline. Although “home page” is typically associated with the web browser, Verizon has co-opt the term to describe their newly minted FiOS TV welcome screen.
The FiOS TV Home Page is a screen on your TV that will appear each time you turn on your Set Top box. After you have finished exploring the FiOS TV Home Page, getting to live TV is easy. Either press the “Exit” button on your FiOS TV remote control or wait 15 seconds and you will see the last channel you viewed.
I assume the objective here is more branding reinforcement and VOD or service up-sell rather than useful-new-customer-centric-feature. However, the presentation is attractive and can be quickly cleared if one so chooses. And we suspect this is the way the industry is moving, given my TiVo Mini‘s initial menu screen (after the television has been off awhile) and Roku’s content curation objectives.
Do people turn their Set Top Boxes on and off? I never have. Certainly if you’ve got a DVR you never turn it “off” since you want it to be recording. And all the power stuff I saw on Comcast’s STB’s some years back suggested you didn’t save any power to speak of by turning their STB’s “off”. Perhaps this also comes up after a certain amount of time with no interaction?
There is a potential advantage to this approach for a cable operator, but oddly I’m not sure what it would be for Verizon. For say Time Warner, if a customer is the only one watching an SDV channel in a neighbourhood, then they’re actually using bandwidth on the network that could be used for others. And kicking them off if nobody is really watching could be useful.
Similar to the TiVo Mini. For the home customer having the TiVo Mini go back to its main menu when it times out means it isn’t wasting bandwidth on your home network that might be getting in the way of something else. And of course someday if they do dynamic tuner assignment, it wouldn’t be locking up a tuner when you’re not watching.
And of course, its always great to have another opportunity to serve up some more ads.
Big step from the “always on” mode – I turn on the TV and a show pops up – will comment further when FIOS rolls it out in NJ
The good news is, it’s easy enough to disable, as long as you follow the directions. If you just go looking through the menu trying to figure out where to turn it off, you’re not going to find it.
For Glen.
Even a f you turn off you DVR top box it will still record any scheduled programs. I recommend turning off the DVR and any other top boxes to maximize speed ajd life of the box.
Just a suggestion.