My chat with my cable company last night

[DaveyF]

Here's my rant....IF a smaller company were to treat their customers in such a manner, or for that matter if an individual like myself were to do the same thing, I can assure you, they or I, wouldn't be in business for very long.
The fact that these large entities or corps can do this with seeming impunity is one of the BIGGEST problems that we have in society today, that's IMHO!!

Sorry, rant over.

 

[amirm]

A few years ago Verizon moved into our area and gave us notice that they were going to bring fiber to our neighborhood. Overnight, the Comcast that I knew was gone and replaced with a new one. They doubled our Internet speed and I get this letter from a VP at Comcast saying if I have any issues I can contact him and had his email address and phone number. So of course, I let him have it. Their then new DVR would not work at all. It had so many bugs it was hard to count them. To my surprise, he answered, accepted that the firmware did not work and promised an update (which later came). Every week or so we would get a letter from them then saying how much they loved us. I recall calling them and getting an instant person. Life was great.

Fast forward a couple of years later, Verizon gets hit with lawsuits from cities (prompted by Comcast I am sure) saying they cannot run video on demand because they are not paying the surcharges cable is paying. The number of lawsuits ballooned and meanwhile, profits started to pour in from wireless side of the business. What to do? Sell the land line business to Frontier and mothball the plans to roll out video services. Overnight, the old Comcast that we knew and hated came back. And here we are.

It was a great way to experience what added competition does. And lack thereof right now as rightly pointed out.

 

[Greg_R]

I had to laugh during the chat session. It was the classic "who is on first" with him constantly not getting the simple concept of me having just one darn new DVR. The bit about transferring me to the wrong chat person was even more amusing.

If it's not in their script then they are lost.

Why aren't you just getting a siliconDust tuner + $300 PC?

 

[amirm]

Why aren't you just getting a siliconDust tuner + $300 PC?

I have a PC based solution in the second home but it just isn't reliable enough. It will not sync with my TV 9 out of 10 times on power up, and crashes once in a while. This is a completely stock machine, dedicted to this use so has no extra gunk on it to make it unreliable. That is in our vacation house so it is not as mission critical. For the primary house, I can't deploy it given those issues.

But yes, it is superb to have a few terabytes of storage in your DVR as I have there. And speed of the guide and such is fantastic.

What's your experience? What is the up time?

 

[Greg_R]

I have a PC based solution in the second home but it just isn't reliable enough. It will not sync with my TV 9 out of 10 times on power up, and crashes once in a while. This is a completely stock machine, dedicted to this use so has no extra gunk on it to make it unreliable. That is in our vacation house so it is not as mission critical. For the primary house, I can't deploy it given those issues.

But yes, it is superb to have a few terabytes of storage in your DVR as I have there. And speed of the guide and such is fantastic.

What's your experience? What is the up time?

I've been running an Ivy Bridge based system (integrated graphics, SSD, 4GB ram, Bluray drive, Rosewill remote, 2TB local DVR storage) with Win7 + Media Center + Media Browser. I use Silicon Dust as my tuner (it's an external box that adds tuners anywhere on your network & it works with cable cards). Stability has been excellent so far, I've been using the latest system for about a year now. I really did not want to tinker with applications, setting, etc. and purchased the guide from here --> http://assassinhtpcblog.com/ . I spend enough time with computers at work... at home I want them to be transparent. I have a nightly job that compresses my DVR files and sticks them out on a large NAS (so the 2 TB only needs to hold that day's files).

If I was buying today and didn't need a BluRay drive I'd take a look at the Intel NUC for the hardware.

 

[amirm]

I also use networked Silicon Dust for OTA tuners in the system I mentioned. That part is good and reliable. It is the rest of the system which is not even though it is a stock Win7 Media Center. Mind you, it is probably 99% up but that one 1% gets you when you least expect it. The Comcast box is slow and has some quirks but uptime is 100%.