BALTHOR's Blog

great job on the posting of this blog. i have digital cable through charter communications. will i still need a converter box?????

You will not need a converter box if you get your service via cable or satellite. You only need it if you receive television via the air waves. That is, you have an antenna on your house or rabbit ears on the tv. If you don't receive tv over the airwaves with an antennae then you will not need the converter box.

I do not think this is really going to be as big a deal as many people try to make it as most people now days get their TV via either a cable service or satellite. I am sure that there will still be lots of people who will complain because they do not use one of these services but most people will be fine.

Time Warner Cable will will be putting new software on your digital cable box. It is called Navigator. The existing software that it is replacing is called Passport. Navigator is not comparable to Passport. It is a "downgrade". Some of the features that you will lose with this software are: the ability to search for a program by keyword, the ability to select the current program that you are watching on the guide to find out how many times it comes on again (you now have to maneuver through screens and type in the name of the program), and the ability to tell whether a program is new or a repeat when you press the info button, just to name a few. Other issues include: the software does not rewind properly (it does not stop at the point shown on the screen), when you swap programs, it sometimes swaps to the wrong channel, the picture quality is poor and the backgroud of the guide is an unappealing shade of blue. Time Warner created Navigator in-house in an effort to duplicate the Passport software created by another company. But Navigator is not comparable. It has less features, does not work properly and the picture quality is poor. Time Warner is trying to force this faulty software on customers because they don't want to pay for the use of Passport, it has nothing to do with going to HD as they will try to tell you. They conducted trials on Navigator before they started rolling it out to customers and received negative responses and complaints. They ignored the complaints that they received from their trials, just as they are trying to ignore complaints from the customers