For those of you who love well designed products, this is great news. Current FiOS TV looks like an outsourced design gone wrong. It’s looks inconsistent and just plain ugly. No more though, new upgrade, dubbed Interactive Media Guide (or IMG for short) has a brand spanking new design that is much sexier (for the lack of a better term). It’s smooth, fast, beautiful, full with 32-bit graphics and color-coded programs.

I think having ironed out the bugs and issues of the first release, Verizon was able to finally focus on the look and it’s about time too. Comcast is not waiting around either with it’s cable offerings (Phone, Internet, TV). Paul is reporting that Comcast is planning to release DOCSIS 3.0, a service which will allow up to 150 megabit per second downloads (read more on his blog). Now, speed and interactive TV guides aren’t really related, but with such speeds, Comcast has virtually endless possibilities of features and gadgets they can add-on to retain their customer base. On top of that, they will easily be able to compete with FiOS high speed offerings.

With Verizon still lagging at rolling out its millions of miles of fiber optics, FiOS TV IMG may not be its best solution at stealing clients. Still, it lowers switching costs as it’ll be much easier for everyday family to learn the new user friendly interface. And for us design geeks, it’s something to marvel at (would you rather choose RAZR’s ugly slow interface or iPhone’s aesthetic look and great user interaction?)

Verizon goes viral

For the new FiOS, Verizon put out a promo website to create a buzz. To help them spread the word, Verizon targeted the young tech crowd. At the bottom of their site, I noticed links for Digg, Delicious, and Slashdot. I was surprised to find them targeting the tech crowd and not an average family, but it makes sense in a way as we’re the early adopters of all things tech.