With my move to Northern California, I am now for the first time in my life confronted with not being in a Time Warner fiefdom. I guess I never quite realized how good I had it. Man oh man is the digital cable interface for comcast light years behind Time Warner. Their guide only shows what is on for the current half hour (as opposed to the next hour and a half) and the extra space on the screen is filled with advertisements you can click on. Who clicks on these things? They also don't have DVR available, which isn't a big deal for me since I'm running Myth, but I thought this was Silicon Valley. Oh well.

What really concerns me though, is the general localized monopoly that these companies get and the restrictions it places on the consumer's choices. More specifically, if you aren't using the digital cable box, you only get 80 or so of the 400 channels which are available. Austin's Time Warner was kind enough to throw us a bone by including HBO-East as one of the channels available without the box, but this is NOT the case for Comcast out here. So, while I'm left trying to figure out how to hook the comcast cable box directly to Myth so that it can access these channels (which I'm sure will make changing the channels *very* slow), I'm left pondering how choice is removed from us bill paying users just so the cable companies can ensure you are paying the extra charges which come with needing their cable box. Blech.

At the same time, for some weird reason, Time Warner's interface in Cincinnati was a million times better than what Austin had (Austin, I believe gets shafted for being an early adopter town, where they roll stuff out first and then leave you with the crappy beta version). So, I'm wondering if anyone has bothered to compile a comparison of cable offerings from city to city. I'd be most interested to see which cities get the most cable channels straight from the cable outlet without needing the cable box.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 04:05 PM in general | Comments (0)