There are 5 ideas I would like to see in a TV/VCR remote. Please pass them on to anyone who might be able to get them implemented.
- finder button. If you misplace the remote, you press a button on the console that makes the remote make a noise and flash as LED to help you find it. Ideally it should work without line of sight -- fallen under a cushion or in the fridge. What would be the cheapest technology to implement that?
- Late at night one by one the channels turn to informercials. It would nice if you could press a button to take a channel off the channel surfer cycle until the next 30 minute interval. You could also use it to help decide on a show, gradually whittling out channels. Then you could hop between three shows, rapidly finding the others during commercials, with no difficultly getting back to your original show.
- The schedule displays provided by the cable company are extremely slow. I would like to be able to scan forward and back very rapidly using the remote. Presumably this would require the cable company digitally encoding the information.
- I would like to sort the channels in order by "goodness". That way I can channel surf primarily in the best channels, only going to the less promising in a drought.
- I would like to press a button that would overlay a display that told me the name of the show, particularly the name of a movie/video I am watching, and ideally even the name of the person currently on screen. (This presumably would require encoding information in the broadcast.)