Following in the foot steps of this fellow’s Rogers post regarding their mobile phone sector, I’m about to go off on a little rant of my own about their cable TV. Before I start, I have to note that I live in a town house condo where it’s not permitted to have satellites on the roof, otherwise I would have switched a long time ago. I recently purchased an HDTV which I’ve been quite happy with so far. The store I bought it from offered some special from Rogers that if I paid $20 when I bought the TV, I could have a Rogers HD terminal for 9 months free. $20 for 9 months of HD terminal rental is pretty good, of course, if the HD terminal that I received last night didn’t suck. I don’t have an HD plan so basically all I get is some HD channels that, at least right now, are just streaming in SD feeds anyway. I’m going to have to look into pricing to get some actual HD channels, and maybe that will help sway my opinion. The only channel I could find last night that actually came in HD was CNNHD, which half the time is also an SD feed with bars on the side that say “CNNHD”. Another beef I have is with the program guide. Why does it still look the same as it did 8 years ago? It’s still the same ugly colours (which by the way there are only 2 of them), and even on the HD terminal, the guide and menus are still low resolution, so they’re just a giant blurry mess on the HDTV. And, I don’t know if this is standard with digital terminals or not, but it’s only 1080i. I have another question, why don’t the Rogers terminals at least highlight the channels that I don’t subscribe to in a different colour? I’m flipping through the guide, see something I want to watch, select it, and then it tells me that I haven’t subscribed to that channel. Unless they step it up a bit, I probably won’t be keeping the HD terminal after 9 months as it just doesn’t seem worth the ridiculous $13 a month extra, which doesn’t even include the HD programming.
More Disappointment from Rogers
July 9th, 2008 by Keith Leave a reply »
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I feel your pain. I used to have a Rogers HD PVR cable box as well, and I hated it. The interface was soooooo outdated, and it had so many “glitches”… it was frustrating. My biggest complaint about their cable boxes is (like yours) the inability to hide channels that you don’t subscribe to, like you can do with the Bell boxes. Instead you’re forced to look through literally hundreds of channels that you don’t even get. Rogers, you suck!
I think there is the convoluted method of favouriting that to which you are subscribed and then only looking at favourites. I’ve yet to met the weekend when I’ve wanted to do this.
That seems like a pretty daunting task but I might have to try it out. Thanks for the pro tip