Ordinary Nothing

Our cable company recently updated the menus used by it’s "digital"
tuners. The regular tuners for analog channels were simple boxes with
channel selection, and frankly, most TVs could very easily receive all
the analog cable stations by themselves anyway, so no problem.

But all the newest channel are sent as digital channels, and you need
special digital receivers/tuners from the cable company. Ideally it
wouldn’t matter, but it does. You see, these tuners offer special
features. You can get a short description of the show you’re watching
(not including something like original name in English, since nobody
there apparently thought anyone would want it. As if any extra details
whatsoever are searchable based on the stupid Hebrew translation of the
name), timetables, and so on.

I don’t mind the extra features, some of them are even useful. But channel switching is slow.
When you enter a channel number, it takes a few seconds for it to
switch. Just browsing channels by going up and down is impractical and
as annoying as hell, it’s just so slow. But that’s it.

In any case, a few weeks ago the cable company decided to upgrade the
design and functionality of all the menus in the digital tuner devices.
So for a while they sent the updates over the cable connections. And
everyone got the new menus. Which look worse than the previous ones,
and offer reduced functionality. But are more similar to what the
competitor, a satellite TV company, is offering. I thought the idea
was that the player with the worse offer copied the better one, but I
guess it doesn’t work like that around here.

Anyway, since I rarely watch the digital channels, and I needed an
extra power outlet for a while, the tuner in my own room was not
working during the time they sent the updates. So now I still have the
old menus. Which work fine.
As long as they don’t decide to roll a second update, I’m a happy
camper. And I seriously consider keeping the thing disconnected when
I’m not using it, despite the simplicity and ease of leaving it always
on…

March 9th, 2005 at 2:11 EET | Categories: Television | Track comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.