Well, in my quest to upgrade my TV situation, I called DirecTV and Time-Warner to see what my options are. Before five minutes ago, I was paying around $55 for my Internet access via cable, and $54 a month to DirecTV. The Net access is since 2003, the DirecTV since 2001. Yeah, shows you how much I've been paying attention.
My first call was to DirecTV. They offered a new HD receiver and dish for free, and a $10 up-charge. Yeah, I know that they have a few more HD channels, but come on. That didn't exactly strike me as a deal.
Next call was to Time-Warner, which is notoriously shitty in terms of customer service, but I figured what the hell. First, I found out my Internet plan was ancient. I was paying the amount that normally gets you 15 mbits down! Yikes. I said that the 7 mbits was fine, and a substantial improvement over the 3 or so I was getting now. The price for that service, stand alone, was ten dollars less.
Then I asked about the TV. Digital cable, with an HD DVR, about the same channels that I already have, locals available in ClearQAM, another $43 over the reduced Internet price. That's $88 a month total, instead of the $110 I was paying before. Um, yeah, not much of a decision to make there! It's not an introductory price either.
So there you have it. The analog signals will stay on the cable for the forseeable future as well, so my DVR is still 100% useful, even more so once BeyondTV supports the rash of ClearQAM tuners out there. Score. I'm not sure how much I'll use the DVR they include, but of course I'll check it out and see what it can do. SmartSkip is too great of a feature to totally leave my BeyondTV box for.
I wonder how much money I would've saved if I would've looked into this years ago.
Dude. I fucking hate Time Warner. We've lived lots and lots of places and seen lots and lots of cable companies, but Time Warner is the worst.
Time Warner still doesn't offer NBC in HD here.
And the new Mystro software they've been rolling out...well, just do a search and read the pages and pages of complaints. You'll be sticking with your BeyondTV.
We just got it here and it's pretty much the final straw. We're just not allowed to install a dish here, so I'm stuck...for now.
I hate Time Warner as well, but have them anyway. They do not offer any HD boxes that are not DVRs. I just wanted a regular HD box for our 2nd HDTV, and they wouldn't do it. Then, the new box they gave us sucks, and the old one - with new software - actually works better.
That's fucked up about the internet service. I really liked Comcast, and I miss them very much since my parents switched us to at&t a year ago or so. Comcast was always improving connection speed without increasing our price.
When we first started with Comcast the max down was about 500KB/s. By the time we were leaving them (about 3 years after starting), I was getting 1MB/s down. Needless to say, I'm very fucking unsatisfied with the 290KB/s down I get now with at&t DSL.
We're pretty happy with DirecTV. Sometimes I wish I had cable, since it plays nicer with, say, a USB tuner, has the local access stuff, etc. But for the most part, I think DirecTV is still our best bet.
I heard that Time Warner compresses the snot out of HD. My cousin was telling me it can get pretty pixelated and even skip and stutter. For those who have it, is that an issue?
Our DSL is 3 Mbps/384 Kbps. I wouldn't complain if it was faster, but it's only $30/month. Cable is a lot more, without buying other services, and the fastest choice in our neighborhood is 5 Mbps / 384 Kbps.
Well, I can get the Clear QAM channels on the TV I just got from the bedroom, and the compression is pretty much indistinguishable from the over-the-air signal. I believe QAM uses the same 6 MHz width (I could be wrong), and if that's the case, there's no reason to compress further unless they stack a ton of channels on one.
DirecTV is where I saw the biggest issues. My future brother-in-law has it, and it's clear that they're squeezing out every last bit of bandwidth they have in the sky. Fast motion scenes (think action movie) or graphic animation (think sports stats graphics) get blocky and can totally fall apart if there are quick cuts or transitions. I was really disappointed. Of course, they compress the crap out of the SD channels too, so I guess I'm not surprised.
I don't think most people realize that cable TV can be vastly different from one place to the next, even with the same operator. The reason is that they all used to exist as atomic systems not likely owned by one of a handful of companies. The legacy of that is in the people who remain after the various sales, and vastly different equipment. Then factor in the last rebuild. In other words, what you have on one system isn't like the next.
Can you tell I was the cable administrator for a local municipality?