We got a Tivo Bolt late last year, and we’ve been enjoying it a lot. We’ve been able to time start watching some TV shows that were inconvenient for us to follow at their air times, watched some movies we otherwise wouldn’t have caught, and Debbi has discovered a couple of shows suggested by the machine which she wouldn’t have found otherwise, in particular Murdoch Mysteries, a police procedural taking place in late 19th century Canada.
We’ve had a few problems with it, though. Our TV provider is Comcast, which means we had to go through the process of setting up a CableCard for the TiVo, which means dealing with Comcast’s quixotic customer service line, and sometimes long hold times at Tivo’s help line. We never managed to get Comcast channel 1 – On Demand – to work, but we later learned that Tivo shows On Demand programming as one of several streaming options.
More annoyingly, recently we noticed that a few channels were no longer coming in. Sometimes they’d drop out for a few days, and then come back. Last week it got bad enough that we missed the last episode of season 2 of The Flash because it couldn’t get the signal. We tried to watch it via On Demand, but we couldn’t get that to work either.
The channels that were missing all had error messages that read, “Searching for a signal on this channel (v52)”. So I did web searches for that phrase, and found this page, where someone fixed the same problem by “re-seating the CableCard”. So I powered down the Tivo, removed the CableCard, inserted it again, and powered it up again. And lo and behold, not only were the missing channels back, but On Demand was working! So we managed to see the conclusion of The Flash at last.
It seems like a remarkable fragile system, and man, I dread having to call Comcast for support, especially since my experience so far is that as soon as they hear I have a TiVo they’ll ship me over to Tivo, where I’ll have a long hold time, and eventually connect with someone helpful who will nonetheless have both of us call back to Comcast.
So, mostly I blame Comcast for it all. Just like I suspect everybody does.
But at least I should be able to fix this particular problem if it happens again.