I can't buy into the idea that Time Warner is intentionally making Remote Controls difficult to use. Not because I don't think they're that evil, but because I don't think they're that able to plan ahead or use design to their advantage.

The problem seems to be the need for a "simple" remote control to control a minimum of four devices. The average "home theater" has a DVD player, a surround sound receiver, one to three video game systems, a cable box or Satellite receiver, and a DVR. Cable companies, in an effort to provide the "only" remote, try to make it so you can control everything with their one device--including the increasingly-complicated features of their own cable box.

You could have something intelligent like a Logitech Harmony remote, but that costs $100, and there's no way Time Warner is going to give away something that costs that much for free. And if they buried some of the features of the remote inside menus, they wouldn't be advertising how many *awesome* (read: niche at best, useless at worst) features they're providing you every time you pick up the remote. The result is a dirt-cheap circuit board remote with more buttons than the average consumer is willing to learn. So they don't.

Some companies have it figured out. Not Logitech--the Harmony is a great product, but it's a band-aid for a problem that they didn't create and they don't have the power to actually solve. Roku (and to a lesser extent, Apple) has it right. A well-designed on-screen display is more usable, more useful, more extensible and easier to learn than any billion-button remote control. Unfortunately, that presents two problems.

The first is getting consumers who have been fearful of on-screen displays since VCR programming was the buzzword for "incomprehensible technological challenge" to try to learn something new.

The second is figuring out how to get hardware manufacturers to let their devices talk to one another or some kind of "master" device in a way that allows a home theater to present a user with a unified interface. Not merely another Windows Media Center or AppleTV, designed primarily to shuffle content from a computer to a TV, but a system that actually senses all the devices connected to the TV and provides a single, coherent interface for everything. That's already what Home Theater junkies are trying to do when they're building Home Theater PCs, but it won't go mainstream until there's a solution that 'just works.'

...but I think there are five big issues that contribute to the mostly sad state of RCUs:

1) Subsidized hardware tends to be crazy cheap. The race to the bottom on hardware costs equals nasty hardware design decisions: big, undifferentiated buttons, crappy paint jobs, over-sized PCBs/housing, wonky balance due to battery placement, etc.. As the premium paid for the remote increases, typically, so does the quality (for example, a lot of folks LOVE their TiVo remotes).

2) Consumer electronics in the living room (e.g., TVs & STBs) tend to have non-existent or wildly underpowered software. This means that the software can't absorb complexity from the remote, and as features accrete over time, so do the buttons needed to invoke them. Look at the Apple Remote or the Hillcrest Loop Pointer. They can get away with their simplicity only because they have such beefy software behind the scenes.

3) Momentum. People don't like it when you mess with their TV. There's not a ton of incentive for cable execs to completely re-architect the user experience when there's such a huge potential to piss off their baseline customers. Keep in mind—some folks don't even use or want the GUIDE. Preserving functionality tends to mean preserving buttons, and, again, as time goes on buttons add up.

4) The complexity of the living room hardware ecosystem. If any remote aspires to dominate the room, it's gotta do an awful lot. Look how bonkers your average universal remote is. I believe a button that opens a Stargate will be standard in 2010.

5) This last issue may be a bit arguable, but I believe that TV aspires to be brainless (it's why I love the stuff) and as such it necessitates ultra-low labor interactions. In other words, TV interactions need to be easily accessed and easily discoverable. Everything on the TV is precedented by channel up/down and volume up/down. In a way, we're lucky we got a D-pad; no one really wants to dig through menus to get to stuff when their sitting on a couch. If a cable company wants a customer to use a feature (e.g., On Demand), it may seem like they HAVE to put a button for it on the remote. They don't have a lot of avenues to teach users about new features. In some sense, the only way you know you have a feature on your DVR is if a button appears on your remote. And there are always new features.

And with that, I must watch less TV.

The ReplayTV remote you show is from the 4000 or 4500 series, easily the worst remote they shipped. The one from the 2000 & 3000 series (http://www.iwantptv.com/images/replay/Remote....) had a very nice layout. It could have been simplified some, but nearly all the arguably-superfluous buttons were in a separated section at the bottom.