[cwoody222]

Use the search feature on this site.

Thus has come up dozens of times in the past few months.

It’s FICTION.

Admins: maybe we can add a sticky post?

 

[cwoody222]

Still unclear to me if the HSC replaces tne Switched Video Tuning Adapter or works with it to keep the cable cards working.

The HSC replaces the TA.

 

[cwoody222]

It's not fiction...! Yesterday I wrote the FCC about this, and today I got a call from Spectrum. The woman was not familiar with Tivo or any other technology, but she confirmed that they will stop supporting the cable cards. When I asked her when, she said that it would be in the near future, but that there's no date yet.

So the woman tasked with allegedly responding to your technical question posed to a government agency “was not familiar with TiVo or any other technology”?

Yea, seems like she’s a reliable source we should trust.

If anything, they just wanted to quickly respond to the FCC that they addressed your concern… by having a no-nothing mouthpiece give you a call and offer no concrete info whatsoever.

Which is exactly what you should expect the outcome to be when trying to use the government to address a consumer concern.

 

[cwoody222]

Pretty much zero possibility of them reversing that.

Cable cards were forced down cableco throats when cable and satellite were the only games in town, and cablecos were gouging the hell out of customers for set top boxes and remotes, and along came TiVo with a clever proposal that allowed third party devices on digital cable but maintained the very strict copy protection controls the owners of the content demanded using a CC.

The cablecos recently went back to the FCC and said that there's plenty of competition for cable with many streaming services, that those services have matured, and there's no longer a need to mandate support for cable cards. The FCC agreed.

Unless most of the streaming services die in the next 12 months, we should consider it to be a permanent rescinding of the CC mandate.

Slight correction here… TiVo did not “come along with a proposal…”

Tivo did not invent or develop CableCards.

CableCards were developed by the cable operators themselves due to a govt mandate in the mid/late 90’s, and it took them close to a decade to come to market.

TiVo benefited from CC but did not create them.

 

[cwoody222]

Spectrum has stopped supporting cable cards in my area (Central Florida) as of about May 4th. My Tivo is toast because of this. I had the Spectrum Tech out today and I had a long conversation with Billing at Spectrum and they can't enable my card to authorize any channels. Not a broken cable card, not a problem with my adapter, not a problem with my Tivo box, just get a not authorized on every channel when using Tivo, also I can see the channels with using the Spectrum TV app on my Samsung Smart TV.

If Spectrum PURPOSELY shut off your cablecard you would have received written notices MONTHS in advance with details, including dates and changes to your billing.

The fact that you cannot access channels is a technical problem, not a change in supported offerings.

Why are you speaking to Billing to authorize your card? You need to speak to technical support.

They broke something, they can fix it.

Every single person one-off technical problem is not proof support is ending.

 

[cwoody222]

I use Spectrum too and have had techs tell me that they would soon be dropping support for cable cards so I told them that the minute they do that they will lose a customer. I live in an area where I have my choice of three cable providers so it's not like I am stuck with Spectrum.

For about the last year (I am not sure when it started) the TA in my set up started throwing errors. I don't know what those errors said because TiVo's screen reader doesn't read them. One time I did get sighted help and they told me that it said "Error 0256", but I have no way of knowing if the error message is the same every time it pops up. It seems to throw errors only when I am listening to one of the Music Choice channels. I never get any errors while I am listening to a recording, in other words, these TA errors seem to only affect live TV. Half the time the error doesn't seem to do anything, and half the time it causes the music to stop playing. Spectrum refuses to do anything to fix this problem. If it only happened once a week, I could live with it, but it happens several times a day and is becoming very annoying.

Techs have been saying support is going away “soon” for 2+ years…

 

[cwoody222]

I know, the last time I talked to someone who seemed to be in the know, they said that Spectrum was rolling out this new high split service that would increase their available bandwidth and that current cable cards would not work with this new service and that there were no plans to develop a cable card that would.

For TiVo lovers like me that pretty much says that Spectrum no longer wants us as customers so I guess my threat was pointless.

Their new “High split converters” which are free, replaces the Tuning Adapter, and accommodates this so the CC continues to function as always.

 

[cwoody222]

That's not the message I got from them, they told me that Spectrum has decided to stop supporting ccable cards so when the high split system is rolled out in my area my cable card would no longer work and that a new high split compatible tuning adaptor would not fix it.

They pretty much told me that if I wanted to keep using TiVo as a cable box, I would have to change providers.

What they told you was wrong.

 

[cwoody222]

I too purchased what I thought was a deal on a Tivo Edge for Cable last year and also purchased another Mini LUX because of the additional tuner capacity. The functionality I have now is perfect for us and I really love Tivo features. I get their business model is selling hardware, but common courtesy would suggest that they at least let valued customers know that there's a chance their cable provider will drop support for cable card in the near future. Maybe I'm being naive, but I feel companies/sales folks should treat customers the way that they would want to be treated. And for online purchases, at least mention it before checkout. 🙂

Yea, that is extremely naive.

 

[cwoody222]

hopefully marketing will cease and desist with the emails/letters after hearing customer complaints.

That is unlikely.

 

[cwoody222]

you're right. the probability that spectrum marketing will stop sending emails/letters implying that cable cards will be incompatible with future network upgrades is low. but i don't think they'll be sending me anymore. the area ops managers called me today and profusely apologized for the correspondence as he was not aware that they were sent out and ensured me that cable cards are not going away as they have large corporate customers that utilize them, (not for tivo but a different system). he said they'd ship HSC to replace tuning adapter before go-live of network upgrade. network upgrade in my area is scheduled for 07/11/23 so should receive it around then. the info on corporate customers use of cable cards was reassuring and news to me. should be a hoot!

Cheers

Large corporate customers would likely be using cards in Spectrum owned STBs which won’t be affected by high split, since Spectrum can make adjustments.

There’s never been a danger of THOSE being unsupported.

The issue has only ever been with cards in third party devices, unable to handle changes that come from the high split.

If the area ops manager conflated these two issues, he doesn’t understand it either.

If you’re getting an HSC you should be good (assuming they can provision it properly), but I just wanted to point out that this is why there’s misinformation... even their managers don’t understand.

 

[cwoody222]

Absolutely, as my ops manager will be the first to admit he doesn't understand everything on the technical side and forget about the spectrum customer support line and marketing. however they can't ignore revenue generated by Tivo users. for example; there are 4.5 million active TiVo devices in the US as of March 31, 2023 according to TiVo's most recent earnings report. conservatively speaking, lets say 1/4 of those devices belong to spectrum users, (4,500,000/4 = 1,125,000) and the average user subscribes to basic cable + 1 premium service + internet service for an estimated monthly subscription payment of $150.00, (i pay just under $200 but have more services). so a conservative estimate for Spectrum's tivo user generated revenue would be, $168,750,000 monthly, (1,125,000 x $150), and $2,025,000,000 annually, ($168,750,000 x 12). that's not nothing.

Cheers

I don’t know how TiVo is reporting their “active devices” but there’s likely not even been a million retail CC users at a given time, ever.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CableCARD

So let’s conservatively cut your estimate to $500M.

Charter’s latest revenue was $54B in 2022.

Retail CC usage is nothing to them. Nada.

 

[cwoody222]

while you're using data from 2016, i'd prefer to use latest data available and it was an estimate. i have to believe that some of 55 million operator-supplied set-top boxes with CableCARDs, (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CableCARD) in 2016 were replaced with Tivo's once people figured out the savings. also charter makes most of its revenue on Residential broadband, Mobile and Advertising:
Charter's revenue by division for 2022:
Residential broadband: $34.6 billion, up 4.9% year-over-year
Residential video: $6.5 billion, down 0.7% year-over-year
Residential telephony: $1.4 billion, up 1.9% year-over-year
Commercial broadband: $4.9 billion, up 6.9% year-over-year
Commercial video: $2.3 billion, down 2.8% year-over-year
Commercial telephony: $0.7 billion, up 1.9% year-over-year
Mobile: $4.8 billion, up 35.8% year-over-year
Advertising: $1.0 billion, up 19.7% year-over-year
with that said, missing numbers for Residential video could determine whether charter hits or misses its quarterly earnings estimates. so again it's not nothing.

Cheers

I think your assumption that retail CC usage (usage in anything but provider’s STB’s) has done anything but decreased since 2016 is flawed.

If customers followed your (correct) logic that TiVos are cheaper than provider’s STB’s TiVo would be a rousing success, which they are not.

I was being generous using 2016 numbers. The state of retail CC usage is worse today than it was in 2016.

From a revenue standpoint, providers don’t care about CC customers. We are a rounding error.

 

[cwoody222]

If that is true then I might have only Spectrum for cable TV and if they are also going to go streaming only or they drop cable card support, my Bolt may become a streaming player.

I don't mind the limitation on available streaming apps because the streaming services they do offer will be more than enough for me plus there is also TiVo Plus. Though to be honest, I haven't yet explored what it has to offer.

As stated over and over and over, Spectrum is not dropping cable card support and is certainly much much too big to go “streaming only” anytime soon.

 

[cwoody222]

Then why do a lot of Spectrum employees tell me that Spectrum is not going to support cable cards when they upgrade their cable TV service?

Because Spectrum cannot communicate the truth to customers or their own employees.

Or, employees inadvertently mangle the truth due to their own confusion/ignorance, and then that’s propagated by posts and beliefs like yours spreading in public forums like this.

 

[cwoody222]

I don’t know if I’d say hit job but Pai was much more business friendly than he was consumer friendly.

That said, consumers had 20 years to make CC a hit and they voted with their wallets and for the most part didn’t care. They preferred* the cable provider’s offerings.

*one could argue that consumers didn’t know about all their choices since providers steered them towards their STBs

I don’t ever think even Pai’s intent was to ever say alternatives existed that offered 100% feature by feature parity (slo mo, etc) but that solutions existed that were “good enough” for the vast amount of consumers. And given their preferences over the past 20 years, I can’t say I disagree.

 

[cwoody222]

In the Indianapolis market, Spectrum has not sent out any communication about the termination of support of Cable Cards (CC) and Tuning Adapters (TA). In about mid-May the problems started and only got worse over time. I have a Roamio Pro and Bolt plus 4 Tivo Lux and a Bolt OTA. The Roamio Pro and the Bolt are connected to the TA and CC. The Tivo Lux are Moca connected to the Bolt(s) and Roamio Pro units. In mid-may channels started to disappear on one of the TA and CC connected to the Roamio Plus. Looked at the stat's and determined select channels (e.g. SWV) were not coming in at all ... no data was being sent through when you look at the 6 channel diagnostics (channel 0 thru 5). I also noted the TA stopped updating firmware updates (same Problem Spectrum had during the SWV conversion ... they kept pushing firmware updates without verifying whether they took or not and from what I could tell at least a half dozen firmware pushes failed afterwards .... same problem experienced with SWV. I contacted Tech Support telling them one TA/CC received all the channels and the other received about half the normal channels and no music channels. I was transferred twice and finally was connected to a tech that could not see any problem on their end and "rolled" - scheduled a Tech to come out in 72 hours with a High Split Convertor (reason for the delay was to get the HSC and get the right Tech). The Tech showed up 3 days later and the first thing he told me "Spectrum no longer supports Tuning Adapters nor Cable Cards" - and No HSC in hand. He put his meters on my equipment and was blown away how strong the High Split signal was coming through. I asked when was Spectrum going to let us know this conversion was going on ... (no answer). But I did learn what became very clear Spectrum has no official plan (like us in the Technology Business use everyday). They literally work on the conversion neighborhood each night depending on the availability of Tech's. The Tech said part of why I had a problem is the "powers to be" had decided to turn up the signal to the max level which was impacting not only my TA but also my Internet Modem .... after 2+ hours with communications back and forth with his head office Engineer, they decided to put a "passive amplifier" on the line coming into my home which gave me a few more channels on the TA/CC that had lost half there channels but it also caused the high end frequency/channels to disappear (that worked previously). I contacted the Cable Card people after this visit to let them know that the Tech did not have nor was he told to bring a HSC (which they had none available). The Cable Card line (866.532.2598) was worthless to be generous. They keep saying we no longer support cable cards nor tuning adapters. I went through having my house rewired, my yard torn up with new cabling installed, etc. when they could not get Switched Digital to work for 9 Months - which was not the problem - the problem was they screwed up the firmware updates to the TA (confirmed with the lead Engineer). And to top it off, since one of the Tuning Adapter's and Cable Card's is getting only half the channels, the Tech suggested I remove that TA and CC from our account so I would not have to pay for the device that only partially worked. So I called Spectrum ..... to remove one of the TA and CC .... Spectrum's system would not let them change my account nor remove one of the two TA and CC that was now only partially working. It is clear Spectrum's trial and error approach to switching to High Split is going to be a bigger disaster than their migration to switched digital. I have waited 30 days as Spectrum requested per their statement to me that the problems we are experiencing as they migrate would be resolved ... guess what .... it is only getting worse. I have made the decision that I had been avoiding to .... "cut the cord" ... go to a better internet company and purchase IP TV services which is costing me less than 50% what I was paying Spectrum. Hope this helps others. I have been a Tivo owner and supporter since the first Tivo boxes in 1999.

Dude.

Definition of PARAGRAPH

a subdivision of a written composition that consists of one or more sentences, deals with one point or gives the words of one speaker, and begins on a new usually indented line; a short composition or note that is complete in one paragraph… See the full definition

www.merriam-webster.com

 

[cwoody222]

I can confirm this. My tuning adaptor went bad so i called spectrum and they said they no longer support cable cards or tuning adaptors so once they break they will not be replaced. Tivo knew about this for at least a year and per customer service their engineers are working on a solution still. If they cannot partner with spectrum and the other cable companies their productand services will become no longer functional and they will lose customers who with no other options will be forced to use cable boxes or streaming apps to view all their channels.

It’s very unlikely your tuning adapter “went bad”.

It likely just needs to be reprovisioned in your account. A simple fix over the phone. You don’t need to ask for new hardware.

I hope when they told you they no longer supported cablecards, you asked how come they continue to charge you monthly, then?

 

[cwoody222]

I did mention I would like a HSC sent over as I understood Cablecards will not longer be supported.

An HSC does not replace CableCards. In fact, their entire purpose is to allow CableCards to continue to function after/if your area switches to high split internet.

If or when your area ceases to support CableCards entirely and they stop functioning, an HSC won’t help since in that case the HSC has no purpose.

What the HSC DOES replace is the tuning adapter. It performs its own high split functions AND the functions the TA used to perform, making needing both redundant.

If your area is not being served by high split, you do not need and likely cannot receive an HSC, since they are limiting distribution to areas that need it.

The fact that Spectrum licensed the HSC for use at all leads one to believe the end of CableCards is not a short while away, regardless of what reps say on the phone.

Also, the type of cablecard you have means nothing. He may have been referring to this issue which doesn’t impact Motorola cards but it’s a completely separate issue and not Spectrum-exclusive.

 

[cwoody222]

Anyone lose just one channel on your cable cards...or is it intentional to run tivo users off? I also use Frontier FIber 500/500 and will not use Spectrum internet again

No, companies don’t regularly sabotage products their customers are paying for in order to “run them off” to another product,

To do so would be illegal.

It’s a technical issue that’s fixable if you contact the provider.