I figured that Cafe Society would be the best place for this as it involves entertainment delivery but feel free to move…
Is equipment upgrading a big thing or was I one of the few with ancient equipment? I have some questions about how my DVR and remote and OnDemand work but before I go into them I want to get a feel for whether others may have the same issues or had them recently.
As a bit of background it took me a while to get any action at all on upgrading (after a tech who came to the house suggested it). First I had to change my service plan. Then they sent me a gateway to replace my modem. Finally I got the new boxes.
Once I got them sent to me and realized what I was getting the switch went pretty smoothly. Now I just have issues with those feature mentioned above not working like they used to.
IME, upgrading is a big deal. I’ve had Comcast for 20+ years, and every few years, I suddenly find that my internet, and / or my cable TV service, isn’t working right. I call Comcast, they give me a new box (or modem), and everything is right again.
One thing to consider is over the years Comcast DVRs changed how they worked. They used to have a literal hard drive that stored recordings but switched to a cloud based system. The advantage is you could record multiple concurrent programs (vs. just one concurrent program) but the old DVR would work if your cable was out or had internet trouble. For that reason I kept my older DVR until moved and dropped cable altogether.
The newest cable modems they have are quite good, with built-in MoCA that actually works and easy control over WiFi connections (for people who care about that sort of thing–most of the advertising is targeted to families.) The DVR being cloud-based is a mixed bag. I’ve got their 4K box, which doesn’t mean much as the only 4K source it actually has is Netflix.
Their fancier OnDemand system is not to my liking. I do like the cloud based DVR that every box shares.
My biggest gripe is the guide. On my old system I could hit the button a second time and get one channel with a vertical listing of 6-8 shows coming up. Now I can’t switch from the main screen that shows a dozen channels and only a couple hours of upcoming shows.
I rent my cable modem from Comcast but I do know that it would be cheaper to just buy one. And by the way, the same thing could have been true of the cable box/DVR as well. As I remember, Obama’s FCC head wanted to require the cable companies to let consumers use their own cable boxes more easily than is now possible. Imagine if Apple, Google or Microsoft offered cable boxes that competed with the ones from Comcast and the other companies.
My comcast DVRs still have hard drives. And fuck be to any tech that tries to make me change it out for “cloud based” storage. May as well just stick to using the OnDemand before going to that crap. (but no, the hard drive ones DON’T work if the cable is out, either.)