This post is not about TV programming content, it’s about… wait for it… WAIT FOR IT…. Cable TV providers. WHAAAAAAT. Yeah, I done did it now. Everyone in NYC has some sort of horror story involving Time Warner Cable. It’s inevitable. Because Time Warner is the devil.
When I moved in August, I found out my new building was Verizon FiOS wired. We thought about making the switch but decided we would go with Time Warner because there was some $10 Time Warner bulk discount in our building (probably because of the FiOS presence, and/or the knowledge that all the Jews, seriously every door on my hall has a mezuzah, including mine, would definitely fall into this bargain trap… GUILTY!)
Then Time Warner totally fucked up our billing in the move and we just stopped paying them. We had to make a few "minimum" payments of varying amounts over the phone because they disconnected our service (true story) but they wouldn’t get the total of what we owed right. And getting on the phone is such a fucking pain. I think it got to the point where we’d rather just not have TV then talk to these assfucks on the phone.
Finally, one day while going over 6 months worth of Time Warner bills with the woman, we found that they had added a $300 charge between October and November for no reason at all. NOW do you get why we weren’t paying our bills? Don’t charge us late fees on money we don’t owe. Go fuck yourselves, Time Warner.
We had had enough. And we placed a call to Verizon FiOS to get the ball rolling. I’m not going to lie, it wasn’t the easiest thing in the world. Apparently my building doesn’t allow this sort of work to be done on the weekends, so I ended up having to take off a half day (that turned into a ¾ day) off in order to sit in my apartment while this really nice tall man installed our FiOS.But he was really really nice and he spoke English with only the slightest of accents, so I was happy. And he looked Asian, so I was sure he knew what he was doing.
Now on to the meaty part of this post: The FiOS Review.
If you can get FiOS- fucking get that shit.
It freezes/skips a fraction of the frequency that Time Warner did. And when FiOS skips if you just push the magic button (to be explained in the next sentence) a few times, it will almost always fix itself.
The magic button… Oh the magic button.
Your goddamn right I made that.
When my roommate and I first discovered it on our Time Warner remote we just about died of happiness. I have ALWAYS been upset with the extreme inferiority of digital cable/DVR to Tivo. If you’ve ever had Tivo before, you know what I’m talking about. It is soooooo much better. And sooooo much more user friendly. When you Fast Forward on Tivo and then press play, it automatically jumps back 10 or 15 seconds because obviously when you’re Fast Forwarding at warp speeds you’re going to stop AFTER the place you actually want to stop. And Tivo remedies that for you.
Fucking digital cable, on the other hand, does not. So once you press play from your fast forward you are already 20 or so seconds into your show and then you have to slowly rewind to get back. But the magic button is a rewind jump back button (located above the rewind button) that you press once and it takes you back 10 or so seconds. Every time my roommate or I used the magic button we would comment on a. how amazing it was and b. how we wished there was a forward magic button.
Well low and behold, Verizon was listening. When we got our FiOS installed one of the first things I noticed was a jump forward button above the Fast Forward button. And not only that, you can adjust how much you jump forward or backward! I think the options are 30, 15 and 10. It was preset to 30, but that was way too much so I brought her down to 10.
Other cool FiOS features: When you “search” in the on demand section you can search for ANYTHING. And by that I mean if you start typing in an actor’s name, all movies that have that name in the description will pop up.
You can go on Twitter and Facebook on the TV, but I’ve yet to try that. My roommate’s boyfriend did it and tweeted the following tweets within 1 minute:
Tweeting from @spewnonsense new verizon FiOS setup. So sweet.
Tweeting from FiOS TV. Love it!
Getting my daily new fix.
Life is good.
Seinfeld – Best episode ever.
All I know is I wasn’t in town when this was happening and when I saw it on Twitter I nearly peed myself. What… a ridiculous human.
Also, to save our precious pennies in this recession we only got on DVR box (on Time Warner we had 3 – one for the living room and one for each of our bedrooms, duh). But Verizon has a thing where all the boxes are connected so we can both watch, in our bedrooms, anything that’s been recorded on the living room DVR. This system is not perfect and I’m not in love with it and I’m almost ready to make moves to change it. We record everything in HD which takes up more room, so the DVR really doesn’t hold a huge amount of stuff. Also, when you’re watching on a non-DVR box you don’t have the power to record and erase programs, which is annoying. So adding more than one DVR box to my set up is probably happening soonish.
All in all, I like FiOS. I'm less angry at my TV because of it. And I don't want to be angry at my TV, because I love my TV and everything it brings into my life. It's been there for me through thick and thin and I want to treat it with the love and respect it deserves.
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3 comments:
mezuzah!! that's what they're called. I always called them jew amulets
eh. same diff.
1. i LOVE getting spewing nonsense shoutouts.
2. i didn't even know JP tweeted more than once from the TV, WHAT a creep.
3. i once had a friend who called mezuzah's jew sticks - she was obv my only non-jewish friend in high school. amulets is a much more elegant term, so thank you slenslee for classying up a hideous home accent that jews are obligated to display.
now onto the task at hand... though i agree that fios shits on TWC (as does any other service provider in existence), the not being able to watch at the same time/not being able to record/delete from 'intermediary' boxes really peeves me. i'm actually considering spending more money. though the end result of the current situation is that i always end up watching chelsea lately (since it's not HD and spewing nonsense is OBV always watching something) and there are only usually 2 episodes of say yes to the dress, which is lower than my nightly quota of 3. i guess things could be worse.
seacrest, out.
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