Since we moved up to the OC, I regret reporting that our cable satisfaction has declined significantly. This area’s cable packages are different than the ones we had in Canton and Ann Arbor; the same amount of money gets us fewer channels, or at least different ones. I miss BBC America and Trio, for example — these channels aren’t included as part of the Digital package we had. But, dammit, we have SpeedVision and OLN! Standard! I think we watched the Survivor reruns a couple of times, but apart from that we are not terribly enthused.
Allow me to digress for a minute: If the FCC forces cablecos to pull the trigger on a-la-carte subscriptions for all channels, I have a feeling a handful of channels, like MTV and USA, will become as expensive as the “Premium Channels” are now, and a lot of the other channels will merge together or disappear.
Anyway, in addition to a less-robust channel lineup, we were plagued by fairly consistent signal issues — the signal going blocky or just disappearing entirely sort of thing. After a few visits, we finally got an installer who sided with me on the whole “there might be something wrong with this set-top box” theory and replaced it with a new box. And it really was a new box. Far from the component-width pizza boxes digital customers have come to know and loathe, the next-gen Cable Monopoly digital box [the DCT-700] is about the size of a DVD case. Not a DVD player, the case a DVD typically is stored within. It has the bare minimum on the back and… it blows.
With the old box, I had it connected to my TV and VCR through the antenna ports with a splitter. I also had it connected to my VCR through the VCR’s video-in, so that, when the situation called, I could tape a show on one of the higher channels by instructing the VCR to tape from the video-in and tuning the set-top box to the appropriate channel. We used this almost exclusively for HBO when we subscribed to it [for Six Feet Under, up until the "Michael gets kidnapped by a crack addict" season when it flew high-the-frick over the shark], as well as other channels in the digital spectrum not tuneable directly through the VCR’s analog TV tuner. For channels the VCR could tune, this gave us the ability to watch one show on the box and tape another on the VCR through its analog tuner.
When the Cable Monopoly contractor replaced the old and busted box, he assured my wife that this functionality would be preserved. I don’t know whether this guy was just stupid or actually evil, but when I arrived home, I came to discover that this new box had no audio through the coaxial port. Beautiful picture but no sound. What this tool had done was tune the box through the video-in on the VCR, which looked like schmutz by the time we got to see it but which, yes, had audio.
I spent the better part of a night fooling around with this new box, even going so far as to track down a Motorola-published manual on another regional cable monopoly’s website that suggested that we should at least get mono audio through the coaxial connection.
I damn sure didn’t want to call you guys and roll another truck — not after the last shyster waltzed in and pulled this switcheroo — so I packed up the box and took it to the “local” Cable Monopoly office. By local, I mean that it is in the same area code. In the past three years, you have closed the two closer offices to save money [for someone, not me]. Because I am an impulse buyer, I decided to upgrade to the HD DVR set-top box, and for a couple of years we were quite pleased. The picture quality was far and away better, and the DVR feature proved even more useful than I imagined.
Then one day about a month ago, the signal went out for about an hour, and when it came back the DVR service was never the same. At first, recorded stuff would stop and go back to the beginning if we FFWDed for too long [like, say, a bottom-of-the-hour commercial break]. I found the undocumented 30sec. skip feature, which worked well, but then the box started choking just on playback of content.
A tech arrived [two hours past the window we were promised, on a Sunday afternoon yet] to replace the box [and we lost about 20 hours of movies we'd been meaning to watch], but it kept doing it. A second technician visited, 90 minutes past the three-hour window promised, but ironically late enough in the day that if I’d known he would have arrived then, I wouldn’t have had to take time off work to wait for him. This guy examined the house wiring and discovered it hadn’t been properly grounded. We’re not terribly concerned with lightning hitting the house, but we appreciated his diligence, and would have been delighted if it had fixed the problem.
The schedules you book these contractors under does not allow your technicians time to wait and record a program with us, then watch it when it is complete for these errors. And each subsequent call resulted in the initial troubleshooting steps being repeated [what are they really doing when they say they're "sending a signal to the box?"] before I could get a tech visit arranged. If there are points of escalation, I never spoke to them. I tried to wait on hold for one, one evening, was promised they would call me Monday, and never heard from them. Inexplicably, each call was concluded with an offer to add digital voice service for a nominal package upgrade fee. I can’t trust you guys to show me an entire episode of “Monk,” and you expect me to trust you with my phone service?
By the end of August, we were so far behind on shows we tried to DVR that there was little point in keeping cable at all. I bought a TiVo and took the digital cable box back to the Cable Monopoly office, one of the most liberating feelings I’ve felt in quite a while.
Cable Monopoly, you have millions of customers across the nation, from your home base in Pennsylvania to San Francisco. I understand that my problems mean very little to you, especially in an area where Local Baby Bell Now Doing Business Under Ma Bell’s Name is still struggling to ramp up their high-speed convergence services. Also, regrettably, we are keeping your high-speed internet service for now, since it works well enough and we can’t be bothered to switch to DSL. But we are counting the days until Wireless Oakland goes live in our neighborhood, and looking forward to a time when we will never need to write you a check.
Competitors of the Cable Monopoly, I call upon you to come to western Oakland County. Bright House, crawl up here from Novi, it’s not that far. Wide Open West, come out west! Verizon, lay some of that Fios on us! I would embrace you, and although I have not conducted a poll, I would guess that I am not alone… ATT, I have too many trees nearby to get your satellite service — believe me, I’ve tried — but if you lay down some fiber, we’ll give it some serious thought. Best case scenario: Community Fiber! Please? I’ll provide refreshments for the meetings. I’ve been told repeatedly that I prepare an awesome cheese-ball.
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