0xDECAFBAD - Tag: tv

Cutting the Cord (or: Bright House, you're fired)

2011-06-10T22:16:39+00:00

TL;DR: Our cable company has offered poor support for our TiVo; cut our channels and allowed our service to degrade; mislead us about possible solutions; and finally wasted our time by sending a contractor to our home instead of a clued-in employee who could handle the issue. And, now that we're going to pursue other options for putting moving pictures on our television, they plan to charge us for cutting the cord. Since I've been looking to write here more, I've just been given a nice excuse to rant.

Bright House has basically a local monopoly on cable TV here. So, we've been a customer of theirs for cable and internet over the past few years.

This is the thing, though: We've spent a lot of money on a cable subscription. In exchange, I expect great and even proactive customer service. I guess I'm unreasonable, because instead we're expected to pay more for less and to accept hassles and up-selling instead of support—because they're almost literally the only game in town. But, other options are getting good enough and we can learn to do without.

You see, we have a TiVo. We like our TiVo. We got one when the girl worked at the company, and we've never gone back. Having one is like living in the future. Yes, Bright House offers their own DVRs, but they're inferior products and we don't want one. So, as far as I'm concerned, Bright House is just a video supplier for our TiVo.

Unfortunately, over the past year, they've done a crappy job. They're transitioning to Switched Digital Video, and that's something our TiVo doesn't support out of the box. As we eventually found out, there's a tuning adapter that could fix things. But, rather than tell us about that up front—and maybe offer to send us one as a part of their transition—they've instead sent us a series of letters listing channels we're going to lose because we rent CableCARDs.

Since I've got better things to do than call the cable company, I put off contacting them. In the meantime, we lost channels as promised. Other channels not listed in the letters began to degrade and became unwatchable.

Finally, I sent an email. A week or so later, they called and left me a voicemail, which described the installation fee and monthly rental rate of a tuning adapter. This, on top of what we already pay for CableCARDs and the underlying cable service itself. At that point, we were pretty annoyed. The cable bill was already high and new fees seemed to appear every month—and they wanted us to pay even more just to get what we'd originally signed up for.

Yes, I understand that SDV will let them make more efficient use of resources and offer exciting new services and yadda yadda yadda—but, to me, it just looks like they're breaking the video feed into our TiVo and expect us to pay more to fix it. It's pretty shady and customer-hostile, this stuff. Oh wait: Didn't some of these guys get fined by the FCC for SDV hijinx not too long ago?

So, rather than jump on getting a tuning adapter installed, I bought an antenna and went retro. It turns out there are over a dozen over-the-air HD channels in range. That might not sound like a lot, but you'd be surprised how much watchable stuff is packed into the major networks versus the other 1000 channels we got on digital cable. The theme here is free and good enough.

True, some of those channels are a pain to tune in using a dinky little indoor antenna, reminicent of the "rabbit ears" days. But, for most of the past month, we got by pretty well. The TiVo works nicely with an antenna. It's a decent Netflix streamer, too. (Though, to be honest, the Xbox 360 works better, can get Hulu Plus, and plays videos from our network. TiVo really, really needs to catch up fast here.)

Having given TV a trial without cable, we decided it was time to call Bright House back to sort out this TiVo thing, one way or another. Since I'm a proven procrastinating wuss about calling the cable company, my wife called and scheduled an appointment for a tech visit.

Here's the fun part: They told her we didn't need a tuning adapter. Instead, they had "HD boxes" which would do the trick. They could install those for free, reclaim our rented CableCARDs, and we'd get a break on our bill at the end. I was dubious, but that sounded surprisingly good!

So, the tech arrived today, near the end of the 2-hour window. He came armed with two Motorola DCX3200 set-top boxes. I thought they must have some kind of control connection to be slaved to the TiVo. My cable-tech-fu is pretty weak, but I assumed they knew what they were doing.

But, no: The tech—who was a contractor and not a Bright House employee—took one look at our TiVo and shrugged. He had no idea how to make these boxes work with that thing. So, he set one up alongside the TiVo and called back to headquarters to schedule another appointment—this time with an elusive real Bright House employee who apparently knew about these things. You know, the guy whom they should have sent in the first place.

I've no real complaints about the contractor: His installation of the set-top box was fine—it was just the wrong solution altogether. Yeah, I could probably finagle something with an IR blaster, but it doesn't seem worth it and probably doesn't work in HD. We could also keep the appointment next week and hope that the bona fide Bright House employee knows what he's doing and leaves us with a working tuning adapter. But, trying to be happy about that starts to feel like Stockholm Syndrome.

After the contractor left, we thought a bit and my wife (again, because the phone is my kryptonite, and I'd be useless without her) called Bright House to cancel our cable.

We wanted to keep the internet access—but even here, they did their best to make us think twice about staying their customer at all. It turns out that to break up our cable/internet bundle, they need to "rebuild our whole system" and that incurs a fee as large as what we paid to install cable in the first place.

The funny thing is that it wouldn't have been hard to keep us happy. Do a little work up front to help keep our TiVo running, and we might have spent even more money on cable. Now, we're looking very hard at alternatives we'd been too complacent to consider before.

But, I guess that's the problem: This is all very old news. They don't really want our TiVo on their network. So, instead, they sent letters promising degraded service and followed through on it. And, when contacted to address the issue, they botched it altogether. Clearly, if third-party set-top boxes and the customers who use them were a priority beyond just avoiding FCC fines, they'd have the right people and processes in place to keep us happy. I think we've gotten the message, now.

Where's that leave us? Well, our bill will be cut in half, at least after we pay for the new setup fee. We'll need to be more mindful and intentional toward what we watch on TV and how we get it, but somehow I think we'll manage. Past that, I think it'll feel good to pay less for a service provided by a company that doesn't really want our business and has a strange notion of customer service.

In the meantime, I think I'll be on the lookout for a better internet provider so we can ditch Bright House outright. The problem is, I don't think the market around here is exactly rife with competition.

Archived Comments

Craig Maloney
2011-06-11T15:57:19

Not sure if you can get it, but I've been happy with Wide Open West for my phone / Internet connectivity. Not sure how they handle the TV part of it, but they've been very responsive to me whenever there's been an outage.
- George H
  2011-06-11T16:46:11
  
  I'm using Wide Open West with a TiVo HD and a CableCard. Works great and no complaints. Although... looking through my Season Passes it looks like most of my shows are available on broadcast TV. That plus Netflix and a possible Hulu Plus subscription* would put my TV bill at around $25/mo. So now I'm thinking of cutting the cable for TV... * Aside: why are south park episodes on Hulu links to SouthParkStudios.com? Can you still get them on the Xbox?
- Les Orchard
  2011-06-11T17:27:31
  
  Yeah, no WOW here. Bright House really does have this area wrapped up. I think we *might* have access to AT&T's Uverse, but I'm not sure they're a much better option.
Steve Ivy
2011-06-11T19:09:08

Hi Les, We've been sans Cable-TV/sat for about 6 mos now, and we're getting by on Netflix and a few iTunes subscriptions and pertty happy about it. My wife really like some of the reality shows (Survivor, Amazing Race, So You Think You Can Dance) so we just invested in an antenna ande an EyeTV-one usb tuner. AS long as I'm not working on the computer thats doing the recording at the same time, the quality is great and we can watch the next day (still considering a hardware h.264 encoder). We use an AppleTV as our main box, the EyeTV exports to itunes so that shows just show up under "TV Shows" on the ATV. --Steve
- Les Orchard
  2011-06-14T15:21:40
  
  We get pretty much all of that with a TiVo, though I've been thinking about picking up an AppleTV and/or a Roku box to play with. I've been pretty surprised with the quality of HD over the air, provided that I get the antenna pointed *just right* :)
Slivertoung
2011-06-12T13:35:46

Birghthouse can only do so much, sometimes it takes a little to get the problem solved but trust me they are doing their best to give you the best in service possible at the most reasonable price. I have had Brighthouse for years and have a TiVo and yes at first it took a bit to get the kinks worked out but they came back till it was fixed on their own dime and now its great, other companys charge everytime they send someone out and most don't even bother working with you if you have Tivo becuase they don't support it. You can go with someone else but expect contracts, good deals that last a bit then trap you into higher prices till your contract is up and little to no customer service skills if you have to call in for help. Try it and when you hate it call BrightHouse back and they will be glad to come help you out and get you all fixed up again they will even help you out of you contract if they have to. Just some advice, if you have a problem don't let it just sit their and bother you, do something proactive let them know something is wrong and see if they don't hop to and try and fix it
- Les Orchard
  2011-06-12T17:12:01
  
  Here's the thing: We went through all of the above, a few years ago, just to get the TiVo working in the first place when we started service with Bright House. They apparently only have "the guy" who knows how to work with TiVo and CableCARDs, and we're "lucky" to get him. And, that was *before* the SDV transition started here. It's not my job to be proactive about their service. We're paying them, not the other way around. They knew something was wrong, because they knew enough to send us letters about breaking our service. They could have been proactive themselves and called us to schedule an appointment with "the guy" to get us hooked up with a tuning adapter before we started losing channels and reception quality. And, when we *did* finally call them, they sent the wrong guy to install the wrong stuff. Sure, we could let them come back and try again, but we've played this game before. We're not going with anyone else - we've cancelled cable altogether.
neilio
2011-06-14T15:24:01

Nice write up, and your experience basically mirrors ours, except replace "Brighthouse" with "Rogers|Bell" (our two major providers). We recently went 100% OTA, supplemented with Netflix and Hulu (via a geofence busting service). It's great, and seeing the pure, uncompressed OTA HD signal is a minor revelation.
- Metaksan
  2011-09-01T12:07:55
  
  Absolutely right..

yahoo TV refreshed, redux and rejected

2006-12-02T20:25:28+00:00

Okay, I'm sick of it now, like many others. I was dazzled by the AJAX pagination technique at first, because I think it's an interesting advance in AJAX in general. But, I've been a user of the Yahoo! TV Grid - er Listings - for years now. It's useless to me now, even after I re-discovered its location after my bookmark broke. I hate to be harsh, but I'd outsourced a part of my brain the Yahoo! TV Grid, and suddenly that part of my brain is damaged.

Update: I've just noticed that this entry's linked to by Dave Winer, so maybe I'm in danger of being read. :) To be not-so-harsh, I had posted some suggestions to the above-linked blog entry, but I'm not sure if they'll get through the moderation queue. Nothing sinister expected or asserted, just an overload of voices to which I'm but a late piler-on.

Basically, I'd be made happy by Yahoo! TV if they treated the TV listings grid as a valued entry point with in-context links to discussions and reviews from the the shows listed, and if they dropped the AJAX pagination to present the entire grid at once for in-browser search and random access visual scanning. This relatively new AJAX pagination technique is pretty sweet, but better applied to data sets ordered by relevance and / or expected to be traversed in one direction.

Also, a note in general to other redesign teams: Watch your entry points and don't break bookmarks unexpectedly.

Archived Comments

Jeremy Zawodny
2006-12-03T04:09:32

Your "like many others" link is 404ing.
l.m.orchard
2006-12-03T05:48:00

Doh't. Used some parens when I mean square braces in my Markdown.

yahoo TV refreshed

2006-11-30T23:02:20+00:00

I'm a little annoyed that the Yahoo! TV refresh last night broke my bookmarks. We're luddites who've rejected Digital Cable and On-Screen Guides for the last few years - and Yahoo! TV has been our solution for that. But, oh well. I've got a new TV guide bookmark now, and all better.

On the other hand, I'm a bit impressed and entertained that the TV guide grid uses an AJAX-ian pagination approach like this one.

Of course, on the other other hand, it's pretty slow now. I found that if I scroll down the the bottom of the page, really really fast, everything gradually loads up. That seems somewhat suboptimal.

Archived Comments

Michal Migurski
2006-12-01T01:00:30

I'm surprised that the new site breaks old links - seems like having Del.icio.us within the company should underscore the importance of permanent URLs.

So long, and thanks for all the Stargate

2006-08-22T04:20:36+00:00

SCI FI Channel confirmed that it will not renew its record-breaking original series Stargate SG-1 for another season, but will pick up its spinoff series Stargate Atlantis for a fourth year. SG-1 aired its 200th episode on Aug. 18, and the SF series is the longest-running SF show on American television.

Source: SCI FI Wire | SG-1 Ends Run; Atlantis Back

This makes me a bit sad, but I pretty much figured the show was over 2 seasons or so ago, before the additions of Ben Browder and Claudia Black to the cast. Practically all of the show's accumulated loose ends from the past 10 years had been tied up, the major enemies defeated, most of the mysteries solved, and a number of central characters retired or gone. The new seasons were pretty much a reboot, with even bigger baddies - but we've been through all this before. And that, in turn makes me doubly sad, because I was a hardcore Farscape fan as well.

At any rate, I'll miss the show terribly - and Stargate Atlantis is a pitiful replacement in my opinion. But, you can't say that this show wasn't given a full opportunity to explore every facet of its universe and round out almost every story that could told within its bounds. Very few scifi shows have gotten this opportunity.

But, alas, after this season, I'll have one less reason to have cable TV. And that's really not a small thing, since I can count the remaining reasons on less than one hand. Like Brad Choate, we might soon be pulling the cable plug.

Archived Comments

Mark
2006-08-22T11:44:44

So much for the thought that we would get a Stargate / Farscape crossover! I would have gladly seen Stargate finish two seasons ago if it meant getting Farscape back, but ah well. The end of Sci-Fi in the mainstream has come (or is there something out there for scapers that I haven't heard of?)
Jim Renaud
2006-08-22T15:48:33

It's not a stargate, it's a fargate!
Mad William Flint
2006-08-22T17:12:24

I was never a stargate fan particularly. I assume it's just due to lack of exposure.

But then I unplugged the cable box from the TV 2 years ago and had salvation army come get the big old tubey thing and have had a cable box sitting on my living room floor since.

Were it not for my net connection...
Alex Schröder
2006-08-24T18:51:19

I recommend an unplugged TV. I only use it a few times a month to watch DVDs or play on my consoles. TV is too boring compared to the Internet!