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Postby Aaron » Sun Dec 17, 2006 5:12 pm

jonedmonton wrote: And, finally, Shaw made a huge deal about being the first cable or satellite TV company in Canada to offer TCM (November 2005 debut, as I recall). They recently added AMC, too. Any idea, ADG, if Rogers beat Shaw to introducing TCM?

Nope, we only just got it last week. That leaves just Bell without it.
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Postby Aaron » Sun Dec 17, 2006 5:16 pm

jonedmonton wrote: I am not aware of any other cable company, besides the one in small town Ontario T-town in the late 1990s, that has yet allowed an ISP to offer broadband over their cable backbone.

3Web offers cable internet in both Rogers and Shaw territory.
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Postby Mike Cleaver » Sun Dec 17, 2006 8:10 pm

I prefer Raverock"s idea.
Let me cherry-pick only the channels I want and charge me accordingly.
This goes for over-the-air, cable only and high-def channels carried on cable and satellite.
Don't make me pay for what I don't want to see, including the WeatherChannel, nutbar religious wackos, world team tiddlywinks and endless infomercials for products that work great on tv but fail miserably once you get them home.
Viewers should not be required to subsidize channels they don't want.
The only reasons I wouldn't switch to TelusTV is no TCM and no real unbundling.
I dumped Shaw for internet when they bitched about how much download/upload I was using.
Despite their claims of "Always On", they manage to piss off customers with unreasonable limits on use.
And all but Rogers are a bunch of hypocrites.
Shaw and the two satellite networks carry several triple xxx channels for heterosexuals but refuse to carry gay and lesbian triple xxx channels.
Rogers doesn't make that distinction.
Problem is, there is no real choice in what all the services offer or the way they offer it.
Again, let me choose the channels I want to watch and I gladly will pay for them.
Don't make me pay for a lot of crap I don't want to see.
Mike Cleaver Broadcast Services
Engineering, News, Voice work and Consulting
Vancouver, BC, Canada

54 years experience at some of Canada's Premier Broadcasting Stations
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Postby jon » Sun Dec 17, 2006 9:21 pm

ADG wrote: 3Web offers cable internet in both Rogers and Shaw territory.

Thanks for the update, ADG. I hadn't been paying that much attention lately.

Looking at their offerings, I see that 3Web offers both ADSL and cable Internet. They are the first I've heard of anywhere to do that. But, again, I don't keep up like I did when I contracted for TELUS in the late '90s, so I may have missed someone.

Personally, for Internet, I gave up on TELUS when they accidentally deleted my account and told me I couldn't get it back for 90 days. But my real issue with them is their stupid software that checks every packet to be sure you aren't using any other MAC addresses than the ones you registered. It only works properly with certain Windows drivers on NICs and routers, and randomly doesn't respond on others. It took me 6 months until I found a tech. at TELUS who told me to throw everything away and buy D-Link. And, he was right -- everything suddenly worked properly after that.

I've been extremely happy with Shaw for the last two years, even upgrading to their $10 extra service (which is still cheaper than what I paid TELUS) to get 2-3Mbps extra in speed, and a much better modem.

I don't want the eyesore that a dish represents, nor the frequent bad reception issues that friends complain about, so I am happy with Shaw cable, including digital cable, though I will be exploring, in the New Year, the possibility of getting digital signals for the standard analogue channels. That is how their new cheap digital cable box is supposed to work, but I don't want to lose the extra quality I get from S-Video cables, which the new box doesn't have. At least for my Motorola DCT2500, the composite video signal is very clearly worse than the S-Video signal for any given channel, when viewed on my new Westinghouse 32" wide screen LCD TV that I got on sale for $799 a few months back when my 20 year old Sony monitor started showing signs of the power supply giving up.

I should also mention that Galaxie's Rock and Roll (pre-1968) channel, free on digital cable, has really, really improved since I last listened to them for any length of time (5 years ago). Previously, they played the same stuff every 22 or 23 hours.

Now there seems to be no discernible pattern and they even include great stuff like a wonderful Jackie Wilson B-side that was a minor R&B hit in the late '50s. And some pre-rock doo wop.

I've been experimenting with burning some DVDs of them, as the video (the title every minute or so) compresses so well that you can probably get close to 12 hours on a single DVD at relatively high speed with very good audio quality.
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Postby tuned » Sun Dec 17, 2006 11:50 pm

I think Ted is great. He is one of the few "sons of" that had some ability and built up the business that he inherited instead of running into the ground. His hyprocrisy is highly entertaining as are his expletive riddled comments about the CRTC and competitors. Ted is a gambler who always has all his chips on the table. He makes big bets and wins big. In spite of making loadsa dough out of his cable monopoly he has no trouble making money in businesses that have lots of competition. The observation that Rogers is usually the first to offer leading edge technology is certainly true. I remember when Shaw took over out West they came and collected our state of the art cable box that Rogers had supplied and replaced it with a "cheapo" Shaw box. Rogers Wireless was he first to offer a cel phone with no roaming and other charges that let you call long distance to the US and from the US to Canada. It took the other cel phone companies years to catch up. Rogers Video took away much of Blockbusters lunch by offering more customer friendly policies.
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