Cablevision Does It Again!

[hiss srq]

Well, all Fox channels are now off the air in Cablevision areas.... This is the last straw for me personally. The only channels I actually watch in New York are FOX, FOX NEWS, YES and ESPN... So 50 percent of the reason I spend 130 a month doesnt even work now... It's time that Dolan find's a new game of chess to play... He runs a horrid company inside and out... From personal experince with the company it's not too rosey on the inside either... I feel bad for all of the Field Service Tech's that are going to have to listen to customers tomorrow as a result of this. Everything Dolan touches except his G4 turns to a pile of crap... Knicks, Rangers, The Garden, Newsday couldnt turn a profit if you gave them 100 million, and the cable/internet suite of products is pure trash... The system is padded down, there is all sorts of noise and interfearnce in it degrading signal quality etc etc... Maybe if they spent a little less money on toys and more on actually giving subscribers to their products some quality it would be worth the money but it's not.... Rant over... Former tech #674 OUT!

[adscram14]

Cablevision is a complete joke. My grandparent's have it and the box itself is so slow, we can't even change the channel (takes 5-6 seconds). We have U-Verse at my house; really good service.

[Gerard]

Cablevision is a complete joke. My grandparent's have it and the box itself is so slow, we can't even change the channel (takes 5-6 seconds). We have U-Verse at my house; really good service.

Interesting but I have no problems with my Cablevision service. The HD works fine and love my DVR. Yeah maybe it takes a few seconds when flipping channels but seriously, what are we talking about....SECONDS?
The real joke is as consumers we have to be caught in the middle of two billion dollar mega companies battling for more of our hard working money. I'm no fan of the Dolans (God knows as a Knick & Ranger fan) but I definitely have
no use for Rupert Murdoch and News Corp. This is ridiculous and we all get screwed in the end no matter what the eventual outcome.

[gonzalu]

Sadly, it is still the fastest Internet service you can get... I get about 2ms latency which is much better than nearly all the other service providers and consistently faster than anyone else. Believe me, I am an avid gamer and this is the difference between a frag or a kill :-)

However, their TV service is just horribly old. They use Cisco netwrok gear for routing all TV service and use Multicast for delivery and for channel streams. When changing channels, you are either pruning or joining a multicast stream... thiscan be OK if properly done, but in my experience, it is better to have a dedicated stream for the channel guide, channel data, graphics etc. And they really should keep the box joined to at least 3 or four multicast streams adjacent above or below the center channel at all times to speed it up.

My feeling is that the bandwidth allocated to their TV grid is not as high as they need. It may have been good with 100 channels but now that they have over 1000 it suffers.

ESP2 HD and similar channels are gorgeous, little compressed etc. But some movie channels are heavily compressed to the point they look like 720p instead of 1080i or even SDTV at times. I can go on and on... I would love to have a choice but in my neighborhood, there is no FiOS, no U-VErse and no way to get Dish NEtwork or DirectTV :-(

This is the best example of monopolistic practices...

[adscram14]

Hey Gerard, I think it might be a problem with their box/DVR. When you switch from any channel to another, it turns black, then grey, then flashes green and pink and finally switches the channel. It's literally painful to watch at all.

[JHNA57]

If your Cablevision box gets slow, unplug it for about 20 seconds, then plug it in and let it re-boot. I find that I have to do this about once every month and it seems to work.

[hiss srq]

Cablevisions system is a weird setup.... It's what you call a "hybrid" system... It starts from the head end's where the system transmits out from the receivers as Fibre and than goes to something called a node. The node is the fiber to RF conversion point. From there a node will feed signal in the form of RF to between 250 and 500 houses... The taps themselves vary in size from 2 drops to as many as 8 drops. Each drop is a different account. One of the problems with these taps is the more down the line you go the less the signal quality is from my experince.... Kind of like a stream of water.... The water gets progressivly more dirty as it goes furthur down... Same applies to signal... Cablevision has a pretty high CLI number generally.. CLI is the acronym for Cumulitave Leak Index... When you leak it goes both ways which means there is signal interfearnce and degridation of the quality of what you see. Cablevision is not very proactive in these issues... From my experince it was a "wait untill it breaks totally" mentality. Pretty much, if someone screams and hollars than it gets addressed... Or at least a bandaid on it. If Cablevision was truely commited to being a quality product they would invest in going completely fibre to the house. They would not be worrying about combating Verizon right now if they did it right in the first place.... When they decided to go fibre they went half assed. Had they gone to a completely fibre system right to the ground block the quality would be tremendously better considering the service and BS people have to put up with. Instead, they decided to half ass it so they can say they have fibre... Fact is, it's not... Fibre does not have leakage problems the way RF based does. If Cablevision had gone fibre right to the house the only risk factor is that when there is an outage it affects a greater number of people. At the same time, it would require a tremendous number less staff as well to maintain the system. The bulk of the staff would be dedicated to the transmission sources and the residental techs would pick up the field problems... Again, Cablevision snubbed themsevles in that department because they didnt want to pay for training or pay the residental techs a few more dollars an hour for the new talent.

[mirrodie]

I am going to to try and convince my wife to get rid of Cable vision and stick to a digital tuner and broadcast channels. There is no need for us to feel sorry for Cablevision.

[Gerard]

Hey Gerard, I think it might be a problem with their box/DVR. When you switch from any channel to another, it turns black, then grey, then flashes green and pink and finally switches the channel. It's literally painful to watch at all.

Yeah mine goes black then grey then the channel. About 2 seconds. Geen and pink are nice colors but.......

[moose135]

Don't blame Cablevision for the deal with Fox (Yes, I'm actually defending Cablevision...) Fox has pulled the same thing with Time Warner and Dish Network. They want to more than double the rights fees Cablevision pays (it may even be tripled - up to something like $170 million per year) Who do you think is going to pay those additional costs? That's right, Cablevision subscribers. I don't have a problem with them standing up to Murdoch and News Corp. They have offered to submit to binding arbitration and asked Fox to keep the channels available until this is settled, but Fox is refusing on all accounts. I'll listen to the Giants on the radio Sunday, if that's what it takes.

[Fighting_falcon_51]

http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/16/n...-carriage-dis/


Newscorp is blocking anybody with a Cablevision IP from accessing their content on Hulu.

The proxy server of your choice should do the trick though.

[T-Bird76]

http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/16/n...-carriage-dis/


Newscorp is blocking anybody with a Cablevision IP from accessing their content on Hulu.

The proxy server of your choice should do the trick though.

FOX programing on Hulu is back on.

Both these companies are scummers to the highest order who have very little regard for their customers.

[Fighting_falcon_51]

FOX programing on Hulu is back on.

Both these companies are scummers to the highest order who have very little regard for their customers.

That's good. It was a low blow on Newcorp's behalf because Cablevision doesn't pay them a dime to put their content on Hulu and it was a stunt to hold Cablevision customers hostage.

[Gerard]

I'll listen to the Giants on the radio Sunday, if that's what it takes.

Yup and the weather here is beautiful today and will head out to enjoy a beautiful Fall day. And when I am in the car pop on the radio to see what is going on. I'll watch
highlights on SportsCenter later. And after today the Giants will be on MNF next week then a bye week after that and this childish pissing contest between two mega-companies
should be resolved.

[mirrodie]

Moose, for the amount of $$ I pay for cable and to say that maybe we watch......15, 20 , AT MOST, of all the 200 channels we have.....

And FOX is really what I do watch....

Maybe they ought to FINALLY give customers an A LA CARTE Option as I would gladly pay for Fox channels and NOT pay for any of the other 180 channels we dont use.

Gonna start looking at Apple TV vs a tuner quite soon.