I wish the manufacturers would come up with a common standard for remotes - perhaps over BT - and just have one "universal" app for my phone. Ehh.
Also, now that you can control the hub remotely, it makes purchasing home automation items more appealing.
The purpose of all of this was so the receiver could IR blast commands to the rest of the customers' devices. AFAIK the only place this was used was for triggering VCR recording, which was amusing given we were working on early DVRs.
The whole time I was thinking how short-sighted this was given we'd certainly be using some standard protocol in a few years since the home media center was going digital. In the early 2000s all the incidental annoyances in digital electronics still seemed like temporary problems that would be swept away by constant disruption as they had been in the 90s, as opposed to the entrenched problems we were stuck with in other technologies.
They're the pinnacle of 1980s consumer electronics technology. Or, well, they're close to the top of the digital electronics we put into analog TVs, anyway.
> Why is no one fixing them?
Because "TV" manufacturers haven't fully internalized the idea that all screens in a consumer's home are, fundamentally, display devices for various computing equipment, all of which is likely on a WiFi LAN, or should be. Some of that computing equipment includes an ATSC tuner, and is likely built into the display itself, but we have HDMI for a reason.
This means that there's no need to have a separate remote. Now, all that needs to happen is the number of buttons per remote need to be reduced as the menus improve, and as some features are automated.
It works well with the Nexus Player, for example.
On the one hand it's simple, it's sleek, and it works.
On the other hand it's so small it gets lost all the time, typing is awful, and for a while when I was getting used to it I'd hit the arrows when I was trying to click the center button.