Insanely close to great

Elgato released a new version of EyeTV today. I’ve waited this 2.3 update very, very eagerly for the last couple of weeks — ever since Elgato revealed that it would contain a new, Front Row -like full screen interface.

A Mac mini is the primary television in our household, and we love the Front Row interface for watching DVDs and downloaded videos. Adding live television to the things accessible through this interface would be make it pure couch potato heaven — not least because of the Apple Remote’s awesome physical form factor and simple interface. So I checked the Elgato site almost daily in anticipation of the release.

Well, I wish I could say that my TV bliss fantasy has come true with EyeTV 2.3. It hasn’t. In fact, EyeTV and the new full screen menu are nearly unusable with the Apple Remote. Consider the key mapping Elgato has chosen:

• Menu: Launch the Full Screen Menu
• Up and Down: Volume Control
• Left and Right: Instant Replay, Back to Live TV
• Pause/Play: Pause/Play

That’s it. At this point, Elgato ran out of buttons. Can’t really blame them — the Apple Remote only has those six. Luckily, the situation was not as dire as it seemed: the Elgato engineers figured out a way to overload the left and right buttons by making a distinction between holding down the buttons and clicking them.

So, they now could add two more features onto the remote. Personally, I would’ve gone with the ability to switch channels, but Elgato didn’t see it that way: rewind and fast forward were more crucial. For the rare event of having to switch channels, you could always launch the full screen menu and choose the new channel from there.

I have all sorts of other little EyeTV quirks I could mention, but this one is pretty illustrative. The bottom line is that EyeTV is about 90% awesome, but they cannot ever seem to get the last 10% right. They need help.

Apple, in the last quarterly results conference call you mentioned something about having over $9 billion cash money in the bank. How about using it to complete the Front Row solution by acquiring this little Munich company that almost could?