Evolution of the Universal TV Remote

In the picture above you can see my old universal remote and my new universal remote. The old one has so many buttons (55) that it will make your head spin. And that button count does not even include all the options that come up on the LED screen. Needless to say, when guests came over they could not figure it out.

The new remote has 16 buttons. Its so simple that anyone from age 2 to 100 can figure it out. If you want to see how it works, then watch the video below. As someone who has programmed countless universal remotes and used every remote you can imagine, I can assure you that nothing beats the remotes now available for cord cutters.

At first, some customers find the simplicity of these new remotes to be a challenge. Where are the numbers they ask? In this new and better world of TV watching, you don’t need numbers. It is difficult to imagine but you must remember that channel numbers are a hold over from the original TV sets. They correspond to transmission frequencies. But now there are so many things to watch like antenna channels, cable channels, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Pluto and Western Classics to name a few. Numbers make sense when you only have 10 – 200 channels to watch. But in this new world of TV, the cord cutter has an infinite amount of free and paid content at their finger tips.

It may take you a few days to get used to these new remotes, but once you do it will be very difficult to go back. At some point you will go on vacation and be forced to watch TV the old way…and you will be annoyed. On more than one occasion I have been on vacation and become so sick of the old way of watching TV that I go to Best Buy and purchase another streaming media player. All I do is hook it up to the WiFi in the vacation home or hotel room. Then I log into my apps and start watching.

The only drawback of these sleek remotes is that they are more likely to get lost between the couch cushions. Some of our customers, in a half joking way, have actually duct taped these remotes to the older larger remotes so they don’t get lost. We don’t recommend this. Just use the remote app on your phone or tablet instead.