Stopped off at the cable place on the way home from work today. Saturday the Tour de France starts and to get Versus, the network that carries the race, we have to upgrade to the Digital Plus tier. It costs and extra $20, but it is worth it for the three weeks of Phil Ligget and Paul Sherwin narrating the bike race and watching the beautiful French countryside glide by. While my CSR was filling out the “paperwork” I picked up a channel guide and noticed something called “Value HD” which offers most of the usual cable channel’s HD versions. I asked her how much more would that be, $4.95 came the reply. What the heck, we have a HDTV this year, it’ll be worth the extra five spot to try it out.
We got home and quickly realized that we had no real place to put converter box. It is a lot larger than last year’s model which fit on top of the tube TV. At first I figured I’d place the flat screen TV on top of the converter box, but it was full of holes for cooling and I didn’t want to melt the TV’s plastic base. Even if there was room, I couldn’t place the box sideways because there were holes there as well. Next we thought that we could just place it on the floor in front of the armoire, it’s only for a month. I doubted the remote would work with it there without having to hold it high over our heads to get the proper angle to clear the coffee table. Didn’t matter, the cables weren’t long enough. It ended up on the empty shelf to the left of the surround sound/DVD player, the only down side to this is we have to keep that door open when watching TV. Small price to pay.
The remote they gave me didn’t match the instruction sheet they gave me, so at first I couldn’t program the cable remote to operate the TV. That meant we now needed two remotes, one for channels and one for volume. I did a internet search for the model number of the remote and found several helpful sites that would offer me the manual – for a fee… But then I decided to RTFM and there on page 3 of the cable company’s booklet were instructions for the remote. Now we are making progress.
I then started surfing through the HD channels and of the approximately 40 available it seemed like every 4th or 5th was viewable. That’s no good. So I then checked to see if we could get Versus, the whole reason for getting the converter box, and we could (unfortunately it isn’t offered in HD though.)
As always the Digital Plus comes free with the half dozen of each Encore and Starz movie channels. I checked them out seeing if I could find something to watch and as I surfed them I kept on going past and discovered that I could also watch all the premium channels, HBO, Cinemax & Showtime.
So, should call and complain about the missing HD channels and take the chance that when they correct that they will also yank the free premium movie channels? or should I keep my mouth shut and enjoy the movies and learn to live without the missing 2/3s of HD channels?
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 710