Comcast

There's something seriously wrong about this.

Comcast — or someone who really, really likes Comcast — evidently bused in its own crowd. These seat-warmers, were paid to fill the room, a move that kept others from taking part.

[Update: Comcast admits to paying people to stack the room in their favor. Read the report.]

They arrived en masse some 90 minutes before the hearing began and occupied almost every available seat, upon which many promptly fell asleep (picture above).
MarkeyComcast’s sleeper cell

One told us that he was “just getting paid to hold someone’s seat.”

>> Listen to the audio

He added that he had no idea what the meeting was about.

If he was holding someone else’s seat, he never gave it up.

Many of this early crowd had mysteriously matching yellow highlighters stuck in their lapels.

Well here I sit, fooled yet again by Comcast.

I was very excited to get the TiVo Series 3 DVR. This is my first TiVo ever. And about time! Or it would be, if it weren't for the absolutely horrid and appallingly incompetent "customer support" of Comcast.

We received the TiVo unit last week. Comcast was supposed to come Sunday morning, "between 8 and 10." They did not show. The tech claimed that nobody was home. I was sitting here all that time.

So they rescheduled for Monday afternoon. The tech came ... but with only one card, even though any full activation of TiVo requires two cards so you can watch and record different programs simultaneously. Not only that, he couldn't get even the one card to work. He left, saying he would return the next day with two cards and, hopefully, a way to get the central office to activate them properly.

And so today I left work over 3 hours early to sit here and wait for Comcast to come and do what they were supposed to do Sunday.

Nobody showed up. I called and was told he was coming. Nobody showed up. Calling again, they said that he reported the job as done. He never showed up!!

So Comcast is now supposedly looking into it and will call me back. But so far they are 10 min late in calling back, and with this track record, I don't expect any call.

So my question is this: Is Comcast deliberately slow-tracking all TiVo activations in order to promote their own competing DVR?

Oh, that reminds me: Comcast has been charging for having a DVR, even though it's just an ordinary HDTV unit.

I suppose I should feel like the cool insider for being a Joost beta tester. All I did was fill out a form some time ago.

Joost has a pretty logo, and their website is full of Flashy color. However, the actual Joost application experience is much more monochrome.

I find the GUI a bit clunky, but that's to be expected in beta. It's better than the ridiculously bad Comcast digital cable UI, a little. Personally I found the placement of navigation buttons to be awkward.

I spent only 15 minutes or so in my first try of Joost. Most of the time I was trying to scroll through channels to find something that actually interested me. This is where the navigation proved a bit challenging. I think my experience was hampered by the fact that I was trying it out at peak hours -- prime time. Maybe in the morning it would be better.

My first impression was that there wasn't all that much on Joost. I can spend hours surfing through what, 500 channels of television on Comcast, and find nothing on. Same with Joost, I fear. In the end, Joost can be only as good as the content it presents.

The low resolution of video is to be expected. You're not going to get high-quality video through the puny ISP bandwidths available today in the US. That puts an imperative on Joost to offer something different, something somehow better -- or at least other -- than what we find on the three-digit cable channels.

Maybe I'm the wrong customer because I'm watching TV on a 42" plasma HDTV. (Hey, it was a deal and it was cheaper than the smaller LCD.) I look at upconverted DVDs and HDTV programs and see something new: details. High resolution is nice.

I'll try Joost again and perhaps share some more thoughts. I hate to leave this post on such a down note, so I'll give it another shot. I want it to be great. I'll settle for okay.

It was already bad enough, the kludgy UI that didn't even qualify for GUI, where moving through the channel selections was less like surfing and more like creeping up and down with a walker and orthopedic shoes.

Now, without improving a thing, Comcast has added on-screeen ads at the bottom of each guide screen. Not only that, as you scroll through the ads, the cursor ends up including the ads in the sequence, making it that much harder to go through the guide.

Digital cable is now that much less usable. Just lovely.