Enough with all the whining about the Blackberry Messenger mess or your iOS-5 download problems (or even a Windows Phone 7's Mango update).
If you think you had a bad tech week, just look at my last seven days, during which I had:
- A constantly crashing cable modem
- A near-dead cable DVR and set-top box
- A hellacious integration of my HBO-Go iPad app
- An intermittently broken Wi-Fi router
- Plus: the aforementioned slow and painful Apple iOS-5 download
Let’s face it: we are utterly dependent upon a soulless swarm of networks, service providers, hardware manufacturers, and software developers.
Like crack dealers, they promise us a never-ending digital party (for a price), but never mention what happens when stuff just stops working. Or when something won’t do what it’s supposed to do. Or work with the other guy’s stuff.
So I figure I spent the equivalent of two full working days requiring nine different technicians (in person, online chat and phone) to get all this stuff to work (fingers crossed).
So, no matter how much I think I know about digital media’s “big picture,” at the nitty-gritty level, I’m just another schlub. And so are you. Consumers know that most aspects of their digitally defined lives are beyond their control, and always will be.
Which is why we’re so damned grateful when technology works well. (I'm convinced that this is the basis for the outpouring of love and gratitude at Steve Jobs’ passing. My friend Jean Firstenberg – a digital grandma -- calls her iPhone the 'idiot-Phone.' “Steve made it easy enough for grannies to handle,” she said in an email this week.
But mostly, consumers are dismayed at how many devices and systems they now have to manage, not to mention user names, passwords, log-ons, software patches and all the rest. If your refrigerator breaks, you call Sears. If your Internet screws up, you need a troubleshooter. Or a fulltime IT person. Or divine intervention.
The situation is even worse if you conduct business from your little digital hive, which many of us do, since 24/7 always-on broadband means nobody ever leaves their office.
A perfect storm of Tech Failure
So, when your Internet is down, it’s a crisis. For days I thought my problem was Apple’s buggy OSX Lion operating system, which has made my Apple Mail and Safari crash much more than before.
By last Thursday the broadband connection kept failing and no amount of rebooting would help. So I called my provider – Charter Cable. After three tech support calls (to Southern India), a trip to the cable office, and a complicated modem registration process, I got a stable signal.
While I had them on the line I figured I’d better take care of a couple of other problems.
Like my failing DVR, the wonderfully easy-to-use Moxi box, my second. The broken sound and pixilated picture meant only one thing – Moxi’s hard drive was dying and Charter was phasing them out. I am doomed to a plain vanilla Cisco DVR interface. (Maybe I could switch providers. Oh, I just got a migraine.)
While I had Charter on the line, I thought, why don’t I try to get that nifty HBO-Go app on my iPad to work. I had tried and failed a few months back, but I just couldn’t do it – I had the wrong user name, passwords and authentication or maybe just bad juju.
Turns out (three different customer service agents later) that Charter had a secret email account for me. Also turned out that it took another 45 minutes to disable the parental controls so that I could watch grown-up HBO stuff. (Like Martin Scorsese’s George Harrison doc that my zombie Moxi ate.)
Even after everything "worked," there were outages. So I called Apple. Very nice customer experience. Lengthy. Seems that my router wasn't playing nicely with my modem. Maybe that was the problem all along. Who knows? Along the way, she forced me to update all my software. During the frenzy. Migraine 2.
Opting Out of Opt-in Media
Next week I’m moderating a Digital Hollywood panel about “Personalized Media”-- machine curation, basically, that leverages user data to create a more customized media experience.
For our media to be personalized, we need an account. To keep our data personal, we need authentication, which gets complicated when there are multiple vendors in the “ecosystem.”
This stuff is way too hard. Simple will always win. The loser will be the guy with the most passwords, user names, accounts, and authentication protocols.
Take a look at Hollywood’s new UltraViolet platform, which launched this week with two movies on disc. Once you buy the product you own it and can watch it, not only the DVD or Blu-Ray, but with proper authentication, you can watch a digital stream from the cloud on various devices via the Flixster movie website, which Warner bought in May. But only if they make it easy. Which they didn’t, according to a scathing Motley Fool review entitled “Hollywood Still Doesn’t Get It.”
Users have to buy the disc of the movie, enter a 12-digit redemption code, create an UltraViolet account, create a Flixter account, and then link the two together.
Worse than my HBO/Charter/iPad cluster f*ck.
And all those lost jobs in Hollywood? They’re going into tech support. At my house.