Are you considering a switch to digital television? Have you done so already? Are you as annoyed with the whole thing as some of the rest of us are?
A few months ago, I switched my service to digital. I wasn’t even planning to do that, but some sweet little pixie knocked on my door and outlined a deal I saw no reason to refuse. Better package, free installation, lower monthly fee—what the heck, sign me up.
The installation came off as promised; the monthly fee, too. And I’ll admit that the upgraded internet access is aces. But the digital television transmission takes some getting used to, and I can’t say that I’m happy with it.
To begin with, just getting used to a new remote is ghastly. Your fingers can never find the right buttons, and you’re constantly hitting something that causes programmus interruptus and you can’t figure out what to do. The new remote has a feature I find particularly annoying: the “jump” forward skips 30 seconds of programming, while the “jump” backward only reverses seven seconds. That means for every excessive skip forward, you have to punch the backward skip four times or more. Very aggravating.
The remote control design also completely omits one very important feature, especially given today’s movie and television production. There is no slow‑motion forward, no frame advance, nothing in the way of controlling the visual except a complete freeze. This means that if you miss some clever little background joke, some handwritten clue flashes past, or you can’t live without reading every single word of a Chuck Lorre vanity card, you must get very adept at freezing the picture at just the right second. One second too late at the pause button, and you have to back up seven seconds, listen to the same snippet of dialogue again, and once more try your hand at getting the freeze just right. If you miss again, repeat the last sentence ad infinitum.
There are other problems with the service, too. Sometime recordings won’t replay. Sometime the on/off button indulges in a playful bit of teasing, where it powers off the box but not the television, or vice versa. While the system allows you to customize a “favorites” program guide, it is not easily accessed, but requires you to navigate two menus down each and every time you want to use it. In addition to many useless (to me) interactive services, they offer a “Weather on Demand” service. Sounds good, right? Except to get the weather “on demand” requires a sequence of exactly seventeen remote control commands. The space shuttle launches with less hoopla than that.
Here’s the biggest aggravation, though. From time to time, the information packets in the digital transmission get scrambled or otherwise rerouted. The picture pixilates, breaks up and freezes, and the audio goes silent. This can last for one or several seconds. It affects both live viewing and recording. It can also occur in the playback of recordings, though in that case you can skip back and the replay will be intact. But when it occurs in real time or is captured at the recording stage, there is no recovery of the missed seconds. Now usually that’s just annoying. Recently, however, I recorded the two‑hour finale of the last season of the saga of a certain time lord who was running out of time. High drama…multiple storylines converged…final scene…then in the last five seconds: freeze/silence. By the time the transmission was restored, the credits were rolling. I missed the end of time itself, all because of that freakin’ digital scramble! My shouts of frustration bounced off the walls of my living room, but to no avail. I had to tape the program on a repeat airing, then fast‑forward through the entire thing again to find out how the universe ended.
At least it wasn’t pay‑per‑view.
I’m not usually an early adapter, and these sorts of problems are one of the reasons I don’t rush toward new technology. It always takes a while to work the bugs out, and during that time the price usually drops, too.
I’m not (quite) saying you shouldn’t get digital television. I just want you to know that the future isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, at least not yet. Maybe you’re better off waiting for digital 2.0.