What is Digg?366 Comments
- The_Wallbanger, on 04/01/2008, -0/+223Whether TV or internet, Comcast would rather choke the pipes than improve the infrastructure. It's this horribly shortsighted resistance for change that will ultimately hurt both the company and consumer.
- logicalnoise, on 04/01/2008, -13/+182all cable networks do this. Direct TV also crunched their HD signal even more despite launching a new satellite. In their minds consumers don't care as long as they think their getting a HD signal.
- apothekari, on 04/01/2008, -3/+125I am a lifelong tv buff, not quite couch potato but close and even though I bought an HDTV a couple of years ago I find myself watching less and less tv.
Like so many things in this country I just feel like the zip is gone from it.
ALL the shows I watch are usually online by illegal means now.
WHY?
They offer what I want to watch without too many commercials.
I figured that as the number of channels increased you could find more things to watch but every channel offers the same four or five types of stupid reality ***** over and over.
For the love of Jeebus , There's more than 50 years of TV that they could run and if it was filmed and not videotaped its in HI DEF!
Gilligans Island, Twilight Zone, hell old episodes of Man from Atlantis any of these beat the ever-lovin-***** out of some group of fat ***** trying to lose weight!
We already know who the biggest loser is!, the stupid ass sitting on the couch watching this *****!
Hell even the old reality shows from the 70's and 80's are better In Search Of,ThrillSeekers, Ripley's believe it or not, That's Incredible,Unsolved Mysteries.
Reality Shows used to focus on the Jaw dropping now they focus on the IQ dropping.
I know I sound like an old fart but it's these reasons that the net is kickin' the teeth in of broadcast stations. - Falldog, on 04/01/2008, -1/+98I'm glad they went out of the way to pick the most important HD channels.
- weddle, on 04/01/2008, -9/+97F Comcast
- Mittop, on 04/01/2008, -1/+65Comcast is so becoming my least favorite company in the world. Worse than IDG Chemicals and Little Debbie Snack Cakes!
- BlueSkyfish, on 04/01/2008, -0/+52I rage whenever I see one of their speedboost commercials. "We're way faster than verizon DSL, and we keep getting faster!" Good job, if you keep this up, maybe soon we can get 1/10th of the speed they get in Japan.
- willy3121, on 04/01/2008, -0/+47Out of all the channels that benefit from HD, they concluded that the DISCOVERY CHANNEL was undeserving? I guess Planet Earth, which nobody must've watched, didn't look good in HD anyways. Good call, Comcast.
- Devrdander, on 04/01/2008, -1/+40i was going to say they are taking page out of DirectTV's playbook but you beat me to it. I got rid of cable a while ago and just watch what i want via Netflix and or online, there isnt anything really worth while on Cable anyways...
- Phernoree, on 04/01/2008, -0/+25DirecTV crunched their mpeg-4 signals? Please enlighten me...
- NaziHatinChimp, on 04/01/2008, -2/+26Dude ***** that my Comcast has been buggy for a few weeks! Now I know why. I am calling them and canceling service right now. Direct TV has more HD channels.
- Scottamus, on 04/01/2008, -1/+24I've had comcast and att uverse and it's all the same bs. HD looks like crap now. I have the vision of watching PBS HD years ago b4 this nonsense etched in my brain. It was incredible. like you were right there. Now all I see is aliasing, pixelization, and terrible quality right after scene changes or during fast action.
- okaroleo, on 04/01/2008, -0/+20Dont ***** with me...
-Debbie - DangerMouse9, on 04/01/2008, -0/+19History Channel, Nat Geo, Discovery, Investigation Discovery, Science Channel, etc. There's almost always something interesting on one of those channels, but I agree that the rest of the channels are mostly crap.
- brufleth, on 04/01/2008, -0/+18I can only hope that Fios comes to my area soon. They're actually laying down new infrastructure instead of cramming more customers on to the same tired old lines.
- mywhitenoise, on 04/01/2008, -0/+16But they saved the Food Network!
- SpectralSounds, on 04/01/2008, -0/+16I watch a lot of stuff on Discovery Channel... but, I'll agree that the rest of Cable channels are pretty pointless.
- MasterThief117, on 04/01/2008, -3/+19Comcast should rename themselves Concast, as all they do is con their customers.
- TheWriteGuy, on 04/01/2008, -1/+16So, not only are there hundreds of channels yet nothing decent to watch, but they all also now look like *****.
- inurb, on 04/01/2008, -0/+15My fios install is april 11th, can't wait to tell comcast to f off.
- evil-doer, on 04/01/2008, -0/+15you can say that again. i couldnt believe the quality of rogers when they went digital. and now that i have hdtv i notice a lot of the channels arent very good either. its not just when theres fast motion, its really bad when one picture fades into another, it gets incredibly blocky. and im paying a fortune for this *****?
- jggr, on 04/01/2008, -1/+16Wonder when the cable companies will realize this and start providing the service we want?
/Ya, I know.. I'm a dreamer. - lazyfisherman, on 04/01/2008, -0/+14"We already know who the biggest loser is!, the stupid ass sitting on the couch watching this *****!"
So true... so true. I automatically turn off reality TV show garbage when I encounter it. My life is stupid enough already - davdev, on 04/01/2008, -0/+14I switched to Fios last fall. So much better. Not only is the HD picture better, but the SD is also light years better. I couldn't even watch SD on my 50" Panny Plasma with Comcast, with FIOS I get great PQ, not as good as HD, but still pretty damn good.
Oh, and I can download 8GB torrents in a couple of hours, instead of days on Comcast - insertAliasHere, on 04/01/2008, -2/+16This comment is brought to you by:
IDG Chemicals: "Selling your body's chemicals after you die!"
and...
Little Debbie Snack Cakes, a subsidiary of IDG Chemicals.
We hope you enjoy the remainder of this thread. - hove, on 04/01/2008, -2/+16Dosn't improving infrastructure mean increasing the number/quality of said cables so you can throw more information accross them?
- inactive, on 04/01/2008, -4/+18Why would your ever dislike Little Debbie? She doesn't hurt anyone, she only makes us feel good.
- zediker, on 04/01/2008, -0/+13You didnt take them with a grain of salt already?
- doomedwer, on 04/01/2008, -2/+15XM and Sirius also do this. That's why some of their "CD quality" stations sound like bad AM radio.
- tnvwboy, on 04/01/2008, -2/+14I had not noticed so much with the HD channels, but I've always seen issues with the SD digital channels. They just need to cut out a bunch of the analog channels and give the space back to the HD channels. They could drop the 'extended' basic easily and push all those channels to digital and still have a TON of room then for quality instead of quantity.
The article also was comparing FIOS vs. Comcast. Not that many communities have FIOS yet. Sure it sucks that Comcast is doing this but short of a dish, which some people cannot get (usually renters) or do not want, what choice do they have? The forums kept bringing up over the air transmissions. Sure for local channels that's great but the issue wasn't with those channels. You cannot get FoodTVHD or HBOHD over the air. - mcnasby, on 04/01/2008, -0/+12The problem is that they were given billions of dollars in tax breaks ten years ago, with the intention of upgrading their service. That never happen and they pocketed the money. Now that consumers are more savvy they're scurrying, trying to figure out how to deliver on their empty promises.
- Schrodinger2, on 04/01/2008, -3/+14Thanks for the explanation. I would've never figured that one out on my own.
- HarleyQuinn, on 04/01/2008, -2/+1310 bucks they don't touch ESPN or "Sports" channels. (Which actually bums me out) I would rather see Discovery HD, or Battlestar on SciFi uncompressed-- then uhhh, geee people playing poker in the World Series of Poker. It is a shame that most HD content is all about "sports" :-(
- Saabzilla, on 04/01/2008, -1/+12It is not even 1080p, its only 1080i. It is an interlaced picture any how. Besides the point, I pray that I can get FiOS here in Chicago. If there is a TV god it will happen and soon!
- lex0nyc, on 04/01/2008, -3/+14When will these people learn the Internet is not a truck?!?!?!?!
- inactive, on 04/01/2008, -0/+10Welcome to the high Def rip off, where we all buy expensive tvs and think we are getting HD, when in fact its only slightly better than normal, and we pay extra for it. How nice
- sancho, on 04/01/2008, -1/+11With the move from mpeg-2 to mpeg-4, DirecTV reduced the amount of bandwidth allocated to each channel. Of course, because of the better compression ratio, it didn't cause a noticeable quality loss.
I have no idea whether Comcast changed compression algorithms, but if the net effect was quality loss (as implied by the images in the link) then that's where the problem lies. - Devrdander, on 04/01/2008, -1/+11No i agree they do have some decent shows, but its not worth the 80$ a month you end up paying for the digital tiers and everything they make you sign up so you can get the 4 channels you want.
- colincornaby, on 04/01/2008, -4/+14"Wow. Can this company be any more evil?" It's not evil, they're just running out of room on their network. They're planning on upgrading to a newer network standard soon though. I think they said they hope to have %30 of the US converted by the end of 2008 or something.
- WoollyMittens, on 04/01/2008, -3/+13This doesn't seem to be a problem anywhere but in the US. When are you guys going to upgrade your country? :)
- lpmiller, on 04/01/2008, -0/+10dish does this as well. Right now you can have 1 of two things - quality, or quantity. The consumer has been demanding quantity for a while now, and frankly HD takes up bandwidth, of which there is only so much.
- carbonetc, on 04/01/2008, -0/+9HD content is blocky and halty with Comcast a quarter of the time anyway.
- daborg, on 04/01/2008, -1/+10Except other countries manage to install new bandwidth just fine.
- iheartboobs, on 04/01/2008, -0/+9Cox is pretty bad too. I'd guess all the cable/satellite providers will lower bandwidth until consumers start complaining in large numbers. Maybe this will give an opening for IPTV type technologies like xbox live or appletv.
- brufleth, on 04/01/2008, -0/+9Thanks for the review. People generally seem satisfied with the service and that's what you should expect from fiber to the home.
Fundamentally it makes sense that as the number of high bandwidth customers increases you need to increase the bandwidth of your system. Comcast's answers all involve limiting use to attempt to reduce traffic. That's just a temporary fix even if they do manage to get the policies to work. With more and more people using their service it has steadily declined in quality for several years now.
In an ideal situation there'd be competition so people like me could simply go with a competing service which offers better quality but until Fios comes to town there is no other viable options. - Crosshare, on 04/01/2008, -0/+9If you compare the Directv (HR20) DVR to the crap Comcast puts out right now, you would salivate over the HR20. I go to my mom's house and I can't even get her Comcast HD DVR to record properly.
- fracktica, on 04/01/2008, -0/+9Why are most cable companies pushing their HD content with MPEG-2? Is it solely an issue of their current fleet of boxes lacking enough processing power? Isn't it possible to fit 4 H.264 HD streams in one MPEG-2 one? Or perhaps most companies are finding it less expensive to upgrade their networks to Fiber/Switch Digital with MPEG-2 than have a more efficient compression/new hardware...
- EtherGnat, on 04/01/2008, -2/+10Cable companies are perfectly free to continue business as usual--the switch to digital broadcasts only affects OTA customers.
- norman619, on 04/01/2008, -0/+8Yes but they bundle those channels with loads of crap you never watch. I'd love to pay for only those channels I actually enjoy and not support those channels I never watch. This is a ripoff plain and simple.
- noseeme, on 04/01/2008, -0/+8I will never try watching a NASCAR race.
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