Comcast digital cable: go straight to hell without passing Go

Comcast, as well as being the cable tv provider in the area, is the company that currently gives me my cable internet connection. I’d been happy with the service and channels I had from our plan (one step above basic: it had the Comedy Central, SciFi, and other things I watch frequently without all the premium channels I don’t watch). Soon Scifi will be moved to a digital-only channel. I have to go get a new digital box in order to watch it, so I make that my tech adventure today. It’s plugged in and set itself up, the equivalent of reporting back to the mothership or whatever the hell it does. I turn it on, and somewhere there is a Hindenberg full of baby Jesus clones, powered by liquified kittens and puppies, crashing into a radio tower in an explosion of sacriligious crying and mewing. Humanity has not only been lost, it was torn asunder by the sheer impact of horror and left a space in my psyche, leaving me a shell of a man tottering for the very vocabulary to describe the disgust with which I have been infused.

Let me share a few gripes about the “new and improved” user interface. In particular, let me complain to the designers who I know will never read this post: Go suck a filthy sock of syphilitic donkey jizz, you garbage-producing wastes of stem cells.

Part the first: My beloved program grid has been replaced. Instead of being able to scan what’s on and what will be on in the next hour and a half by a grid according to time and channel, I am forced to see one or the other. I can see what’s on in the current half hour, or I can see what on one channel for the next two hours. The previous guide made sense. It was logical and readable. The new “guide” is a smegging insult. To make matters worse, the new guide has the TV Guide logo plastered across it - the previous guide was the exact same fucking layout as the TV Guide magazine. No more! What the ungodly feck do you thing you’re trying to do?!

Part the second: messages. The cable box should pipe the signal into a form translated into audio and digital signals for my television. That’s it. I do not need email on my cable box telling me that you have baseball games or 450 channels of maraichi music. In fact, if you wanted to let me know of the programming, how about putting it on the damned program lineup?! Too bad nobody will bother to navigate the horrible thing now to see. There is a red light on the cable box telling me if there are messages or not, even if the box is off. Ding! it says, You’ve got spam! A baleful glaring eye, piercing into the soul. It will never go away until I submit and open the stupid fucking spam message.

Part the third: Previously, with the old box, when turning to a new channel it would provide a small text description of the show. It would tall you the time it came on, the time it will end, the title, and even the brief description of the plot if it had one in the program guide. Now when changing channels a huge yellow box containing one line of text - the name of the show - covers the bottom of the screen. This box contains this one line, the aforementioned TV GUide logo, and the subject of the next part.

Part the fourth: advertisements. Each and every screen on the box’s system has at least one outside (i.e., non-Comcast) advertisement. The main menu. The channel guide. The options. The fucking spam mailbox. All these worlds and more are given to the ads, and no monolith can save me for the black box itself is the one feeding these abominations unto my screen. These are the same types of ads that you would see on your less well-to do websites, whoring their space out to companies without the slightest concern or connection to subject. Of course I’d be interested in debt consolidation! Of course I want to buy a boquet of flowers! I don’t mind at all that this piece of monkey shit is hogging up screen space. Again: how much more am I paying to have the ‘privilage’ of having your sickening advertisements piped directly into my information source?

All I want is to watch television. How fucking hard is that?

Best mental image ever.

I think I’ll keep my DISH.

Comcast service must be different out there. We have no box-based email, no strategically-placed advertisements, and our program guide covers 90 minutes at a time.

A major project was planned and PA One-Call was notified 2 weeks ago. Many spray painted marks on the lawn and driveway later, the cable tv line was pulled up with the second machine shovel.

Silly me-why would I have presumed that Comcast would mark their underground cable within 6 feet of the actual location?

Once notified of their error, they promised the customer repair within 24 hours, which is apparently in a parallel universe where 24=72. Their repair was run above grade without slack, such that a herd of ardent tree rats couldn’t bury it if their nuts depended on the task.

Why people pay for this form of abuse is beyond me.

Same here.

I switched from the local cable (which is now Comcast) to DISH a few years ago. I have Comcast for digital Internet, because it’s the only game in town, but damn—I’m not having their crappy cable TV.

DISH Network may not be perfect, but I RAN, yes ran to it, after waiting for the local cable company to finally give us Sci Fi and some other channels that they kept on promising but not delivering. I fell in love with Sci Fi Channel at my other home, and when I moved here, the local cable didn’t have it. “Soon,” they kept on saying, “Soon.” Well, “Soon” was over 2 years and I was fricking sick of waiting. Screw them.

Never again. I’m never going back to cable unless something dire happens to DISH and I just can’t keep it or something. Besides, I get a few local LA stations with DISH and I’ll never get that with cable.

Aye, I was like you a scant day ago. Beware, for when a channel you love gets switched to digital you may fall into the same trap I have. Heed my words!

I also have Comcast, and recently switched to Digital from the basic stuff. There is an option in the main menu to turn off the Messages thing. After getting four or five messages (complete with that baleful glaring eye), all about wrestling or boxing, I turned it off. See if you can do that.

Since I never had it before, I guess I don’t know what I’m missing. When I surf through channels, I just get the yellow title bar that tells me what show is on (with the start and end times), which I love. Even if a commerical is on, I know what show is currently on. I also love being able to scroll ahead to see what’s on later. I also see a small ad, but I can ignore it for the most part. To see a description of the show, I have to push the “Info” button, and then I get the text description (plus two more little ads on the side, but I can ignore them).
I still have the regular TV Guide channel that shows what’s on for the next hour and a half, too. Maybe that’s something your local cable company dropped?

Yes, you can turn Messages off in the Setup area, along with some other options. Only problem is that, if you lose power, all the settings revert to their defaults and you have to do it again. Or you can just mentally tune out that little red light, or put some black tape over it. Just like you can mentally tune out the ads, ya know?

The new program guide isn’t that bad - if you want to plan your viewing for the entire day (not just 1.5 hours, and it used to be 2 hours), hit “By Channel” and scroll through the times. It really doesn’t take any longer than it used to, and you get more info. Plus, if something grabs your attention, you can hit “Info” and find out, something you couldn’t do with an analog box.

You can do all your channel surfing while watching, too. Hit one of the arrow keys, not the “OK” key, and the title box comes up. Scroll through the channels or the time, or even punch in a channel number to go right to it, and your show will still be on most of the screen and all of the audio. Hit “Info” if you like and that screen will come up, with the audio still on.

Check out all the beautiful crap in the 200 and 300 channel number range, too - the analog boxes just couldn’t give you that, or the music channels either. And isn’t it nice not to have to call anybody to set up your pay per view “adult programming”?

Yikes, this has made me realize just how much of a couch potato I’ve become. And also that all those puppies and kittens were liquified in vain.

I have to say, I much prefer the new digital menus to the old ones. If I want to just look at movies that are coming up, I can. Different strokes, I guess.

Somewhere probably in the lower channels you still have the old grid you prefer, you just have to look for it, it’s called TV Guide Channel, it won’t however list all your channels becuase you have more, I don’t know why Comcast doesn’t tell people this. You can also find out the info on the movie or show, by hitting ‘info’ on your remote. For some reason I can’t understand they wont provide an episode description for cartoons, which I find I do annoying.

My only real complaint is that I find myself missing Stand-up Comedy on HBO and Showtime because I hate looking by Channel, a problem when you have 6 HBOs and 6 Showtimes or however many there are. I wish that they’d make that a option on on the menu. Hello, Comcast?

Oh! That explains what happened today! We have Time Warner digital, which we’re normally quite satisfied with, but the cable went out in the storm today. Well, these things happen, except that means the internet is also out so I get a little jumpy, you know. Just a little withdrawal.

Anyway, when we tried turning the cable back on to see if it was going to spontaneously ressurect or if we’d have to stare at it for the next few hours, we got a little message that “Advanced functions are not currently available. Message light will blink for new updates” or something. Well, evidently “advanced functions” means TV, which surprised me a bit - what’s a non-advanced function for a damned cable box?

But now I know that my cable box THINKS it has a spam e-mail box! And it dosen’t! (Or if it does, we have no idea how to use it, thus making it nonexistent for all intents and purposes!) Man, sometimes life dosen’t fuck you over after all.

Oh, it came back in a couple hours, FYI, so I could check my e-mail again and feel better. :slight_smile:

Because I’m not allowed to mount a satellite dish on the outside of my apartment building. That’s the only reason. I even tried to set the dish up inside, but the signals don’t penetrate the plexiglass (or whatever it is) window. Window open, full signal. Window closed, none. So I continue being serviced by Comcast. They could at least use lube.

Man. I’m gonna pass the OP onto a friend who bitches and moans about Comcast, but is still thinking about going all in for their digital cable, “Because it can’t be any worse.”

Yes it most assuredly can. . .

No Southwest faceing balcony? If you got one of them, you are golden. The FCC has officialy given landlords/condo associations/homeowner associations the finger about this.

In my case, the neighbors balcony is between me and where the DirecTV dish wants to point. Somehow I think that the powers that be would object to me useing a 1920’s style death ray to clear a clean line of sight.

Frelling idiots wired the building with RG-59 18 years ago. Take a wild guess what spacecraft it looks like they are useing for our building cable?

The Mars Ghoul could get a better signal in here.

I have to break out the compass and see if we can get Dish Network—they have a aim point further west, I might yet be in luck… :cool:

I, too, have Comcast (both cable and internet) in Northern Virginia: a few weeks ago I traded in my digital boxes, and now just have expanded basic on my TVs. I had no problem with the service or the boxes or anything, I just never watched the digital channels (well, except Science and BBC America, but only occasionally) and I got tired of paying almost $30/month extra…more than I pay for Netflix, which I like better than the movie channels! :smiley:

The only thing I miss is the program guide: I miss being able to set reminders for a show; knowing what show was on any given channel even during commercials; browsing other stations without changing the channel; etc. The TV Guide channel works in a pinch, but I get impatient with the scrolling (and there’s no way to get details on a show). And I’m trying to avoid re-subscribing to TV Guide itself, because of the cost and the fact that I wind up only looking at half of the magazine. My ‘fix’ these days is to use Zap2it, a highly-customizeable online program guide. It’s free, but I like it so much that I think I would pay for it if they ever needed to start charging.

The OP makes me a little nervous…Comcast better not try to take Sci-Fi off the expanded basic lineup around here! :wink:

BraheSilver I had lots of fun inserting Mediacom for Comcast in your OP. They are both the same evil. Hell, somebody at Mediacom farts and our cable is out. And they wonder why I laugh when they call offering me their “fast access” internet. I have DSL through BellSouth. It works even when somebody at BellSouth farts. I have told those turd garglers at Mediacom that since I never know if the cable will be working at any given time, why should I believe their internet access is any better. They can’t figure that out.

Yeah, I looked into that, hoping there’d be a loophole for me somewhere. My windows face mostly-west and I can “see” the satellite from there, but the outside of the building is flat – it looks like a four-story-tall brick. No outside area that’s mine and mine alone, no satellite TV, no telling Comcast where to shove their cable and how many twists to give it on its way in.

And Misnomer, here Comcast’s already bumped SciFi into the satellite band for no good reason other than to make people like me pay for the digital service instead of just basic cable. They did it last December and I missed the second half of the SG1 season while I sat on the fence about getting satellite. Now I forget to watch it when it’s on :smack:

I have Comcast digital cable.

I also have TiVo. That means I never need to touch the shitty Comcast interface. I never even see it, except for the two seconds the program box appears after TiVo changes the channel.

Seriously. You won’t think about how crappy Comcast is when you’re soaring through the gorgeous scenery that is the landscape of the Tivolution. :cool:
Am I a broken record or what?

Question for both you and BraheSilver: when they moved Sci-Fi to digital, did they also up the digital prices? Going back to the same service/pricing I just got rid of would be frustrating, but I could deal with it; what would piss me off (but wouldn’t really surprise me) is if they moved a ‘core’ channel like that and also started charging more for digital.

Well, luckily you’ve only missed this season’s premiere…but I suggest programming a VCR or TiVo every Friday evening, just to be on the safe side. :wink: