TV-Free Thursday: TiVo Vs. the Cable Guy

Hm. Just the other day my head was being turned by an e-mail offer of a 150-hour TiVo HD box (upgrading from my old Series 2 TiVo, which I love) with lifetime service for under a thousand bucks. What a deal ... or is it?

The thought of doing away with my inefficient Time Warner DVR box is sorely tempting, but your tales of cable cards and reluctant customer support are cautionary, to say the least. It's hard to decide whether it's worth suffering seemingly endless Install Agony in exchange for years of (what I hope would be) HD TiVo bliss. Is this the kind of choice women face before deciding whether to get pregnant?

I have a Series 3 Tivo, and I have had similar (if less dramatic) problems with Comcast re: cable cards. Comcast seems to go out of their way to insure their employees have no idea what to do with cable cards. And it works; they've already succeeded in killing cable card-compliant TV tvs.

A couple of months ago, my Tivo cable cards suddenly stopped recognizing HBO. I had a choice to make. I could spend a hour or more arguing with the customer service rep about cable cards or I could spend two minutes cancelling HBO. I chose the latter. Haven't really regretted it. Figure I can wait for DVD on Flight of the Conchords.

Very similar experience here, but with Comcast in Atlanta. Back in June, though, my issue was more with incompetent Comcast techs than with TiVo itself, which worked exactly the way it was supposed to. Instead, I had to deal with Comcast telling me the cards didn't work -- on two separate visits -- and a particularly rude tech guy who sat on my sofa while *I* configured the card and proclaimed to a friend on his cellphones that "Cablecards are crap" and "I don't get paid enough to deal with this s---."

Regarding the try the cable DVR first advice...I think it's a good tip. I love our HD DVR through Verizon, have had incredibly few issues, and decent customer service when necessary (decent for the larger world; excellent compared to past cable experiences). Admittedly, I've never tried TiVo, which might be the key to my satisfaction -- ignorance is bliss, and all that.

[...] TiVo may be on life support, but the DVD player still works, and midseason TV is starting to come in fast and furious. Among [...]

The Cablecard mess is one of your classic lose-lose situations. The FCC didn't think it was a good idea that consumers were stuck buying their cable boxes from the cable company (a classic monopoly situation); the cable systems weren't thrilled at letting mystery devices access their networks, especially as they moved to profitable pay-per-view programming. Thus the cumbersome, but effective (for the cable company, too effective for the cable user) setup and authorization rigamarole.
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And the ironic thing is, that the Cablecard functionality doesn't get "good" until the 2.0 standard, which will have its own set of headaches as people begin to use devices that support it.
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(Actually, the truly ironic thing would be the next standard is an entirely software based system that would run in memory on your TV/Tivo/etc.; I can only imagine how people will react once computer viruses start taking out their TVs.)

Not to discount your situation, but I wanted to chime in that I now have two Tivo HD boxes, purchased several months apart and installed by different Time Warner techs, and in instances the installs were done in less than 45 minutes. The only weirdness I had was after the first install one of my premium channels didn't come in and I didn't discover that until later. I called Time Warner and they fixed it within 5 minutes.

It isn't always this nightmarish! The only lasting disappointment I have had was discovering that Time Warner has the copy block on almost every channel to I can't use TivoToGo, and how many HD channels were using Switched Digital (including Food Network and Discovery, my favorites) and were thus unavailable. Supposedly an SDV dongle is coming to cover the latter, the former I guess I just have to live with.

Why don't you just get DirectTV?
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This not a rhetorical question.
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You are missing out on some of television's best programming and have routinely been forced to endure what is politely described as a negative customer experience by going with a competing service. I am afraid that if you have trouble in the future (which, not out of the question) I will find it very hard to summon any sympathy at all.
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If your car breaks down every two days, and you keep taking it to the same mechanic to get it fixed but it continues to break down every two days, at some point you would switch mechanics, right?

My experience with my Series 3 Tivo and Cox Communications here in Phoenix started very poor but moved up to manageable.

At first it was similar to other people's experiences. Techs would come out having no idea what they were doing, people on the phone with Cox would have no idea what a cable card was and that they supported them... I replaced my first Series 3 box because Cox was convinced it was broken when they couldn't get the cards to work.

Eventually though things got better. The techs appeared to be more knowledgeable and tended to bring out a stack of cards to try so they could be reasonably certain they didn't just have a dud card. Support over the phone continued to insist that a tech had to come out no matter what my problem was, but at least they had heard of cable cards. My guess is that I was just lucky and had enough Tivo installations in the area that the techs learned something in the process.

I have to give Cox credit though, they took responsibility for the problem. I spent little to no time on the phone with Tivo and Cox did figure it out eventually and get my setup working (unfortunately it took half a dozen visits the first time).

One piece of advice: Find out whether your cable company has multiple models or manufacturers for their cable cards. Do they have multi-stream cards? Try to have the tech bring out one of each of the available models, sometimes one model works better than the others.

When I bought my HD Tivo, I braced myself for cable-card hell. Indeed, the phone call to TWC to set up the cable card installation was slooooooow going, but the guy who came to the apartment (here in Brooklyn) set the cards up in less than ten minutes. Maybe they laid him off since then.
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I had DirecTV with two non-HD Tivos before I moved here (I'm not allowed to do the dish thing in my apartment building here). It's great when it works. If you have an issue, though, both companies just tell you it's the other guy's problem. I thought my head would explode trying to solve my last issue with that setup--it was like trying to set up your bitter brunch and have it catered on the dark side of the moon--as is evidenced by the fact that the problem never, ever got fixed.
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I love DirecTV, but at the time they were not offering genuine Tivo with DirecTV, only their ti-faux product, which was just not as good.
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Tivo's product is awesome, but their customer service is usually appalling. They seem to think it's appropriate to outsource a lot of their tech support to The Internet--chat rooms, hobbyists, what have you. I'm glad someone actually took the time out to help ya, JP.

[...] I'd been without cable service since Friday, when my HD TiVo died; follow the long boring story backwards from here.) And sure enough, within a few minutes of showing up—which, credit is due, was indeed between [...]

I had a somewhat similar experience with Comcast in Houston. My old single tuner Series 2 was dying so I ordered an HD TiVo as a replacement (it was only slightly more expensive than replacing the drive). I knew there'd be trouble with the CableCards, but I felt I'd done my research so I could at least walk the techs through getting it to work. Little did I realize that they had no intention of listening to me.

I picked up an M card from the local billing office and plugged it in when I got home. I called the number they gave me for activation and talked to a CS rep who said "the signal should get through in a couple of hours. If it doesn't work, call back." I started flipping through channels the next day and hey, it's work...wait, why don't I get any channels over 100? So I checked and the card hadn't been sent an initialization signal. I knew that was specifically what it needed from my research. I had read that the online chat support was somewhat better, so I tried that. They sent the signal twice and told me to wait overnight.

The next day, I check the channels again. Hey, I get channels over 100! Ya...where are my premium channels? (sigh) So I call on the phone again and they have to send a guy out, they say. Card is probably bad. They send a guy out, he looks it over, he DOESN'T HAVE A REPLACEMENT CARD ("We're not allowed to carry them with us.") and fiddles with it. I tell him what I need. I need the account to be authorized for premium channels. See this? Right, this should have a V next to it in the CableCard screen. FINALLY, he tells me that he has to call ANOTHER COMPANY that handles their CableCard authorizations and it should work in a while and they'll call to confirm. Never got a call to confirm, but it did start working about four hours later.

Overall, it took three days to get it to work. Luckily, I used that time to transfer recordings from the old box to the new one using MRV.

Also, the tech told me that Comcast was "getting away from CableCards and going back to boxes". I told him that was unlikely since the FCC mandated they had to support them. He just shrugged.

My tale is similar enough - last year, got my third TiVo: an HD transferring my lifetime service from my original 2000 box. Comcast in Vermont is hit & miss, but CableCards were consistently misses. The first install seemed smooth enough, even though the tech had never dealt with CCs before. But it turns out after he left, that only one of the cards worked, making it a single-tuner box. I spent three days talking to various people (including from a subcontractor who refused to acknowledge their relationship with Comcast), many of whom I needed to convince that there's nothing to do in-person with CCs, and all they needed was the string of numbers I could read to them. The TiVo support was great, and they volunteered to do a conference call with Comcast, but Comcast refused. Eventually, I found the one Comcast support person who had a clue - he solved my problem in 10 minutes by changing some settings on Comcast's server. It's worked great since. (Also note that nobody seems to know what Comcast would charge me for the CCs, as I heard everything from "free" to "$10 a month." I think I pay $5/month now, which is ridiculous but unavoidable.)

Short answer: it's a short-term major hassle, but TiVo is so superior to generic DVRs that it's worth it. (Exhibit A: TiVo-to-go transferring HD episodes to my laptop. Beat that, DirectTV!)

[...] James Poniewozik | Comments (0) | Permalink | Trackbacks (0) | Email This While chronicling my week in TiVo-service hell last week, there's one thing I didn't point out: I actually probably got better service than the [...]