WalkerPad

So Comcast finally made good on the long standing rumor that they where going to start double dipping and put up add banners into their allrady crapy sub par interface on the noisy Motorola boxes.

Zats not funny has a article up on this but doesn’t go into the most broken part.

This has me totally pissed off and is going to drive me to spend a bunch of cash on either a MCE box with a cable card tuner or a series 3 much sooner then I had wanted to (I was waiting on price drops and product maturity).

The worse thing about these totally intrusive banners is they make the guide less usable then it already was (which is saying something). When ever you move up or down with the arrows it catches on the stupid banner slowing scrolls and adding tracking problems to what is happening on the screen.
It dropped the WAF even lower then it already was for the over all experience, which ranked pretty low compared to our old direct TV HD tivo.
So my question is what kind of crack are Comcast exes smoking, they do know they are already charging me for the box and guide right? Do they really think they get to double dip like this with out driving away customers to their competitors?
First day it popped up I reached for the phone and started to call dish network but decided to wait until we smoked through the current show list.
My god, the greed and stupidity in the cable industries is just insane. Their willingness to train wreck the customer experience for a couple bucks is just nuts. We might not have a great range of choice right not solve this type of problem but at least we have a few, and more coming.

This whole scenario clearly highlights the importance of enforcing, brutally, even the crappy not really open standard like cable card and forcing cable companies to deploy and support them.

It’s the only way we will even get a little tast of market choice.

Ideally sat companies should be held to the similar standards and free market end user devices should be able to easily interpolate between ANY provider.

I like to dream that MS is drifting this way slowly with MCE, but they are such pussies when it comes to the IP owners that I have trouble believing their end goals are the right one’s. Will they stand up for the right reasons, like giving users a good seamless experience that supports controlling their environment, or sell out to the way comcast does to make a buck at their users expense the minute they think they have a little market control… *sigh*. Zats not funny correctly points to the amount of space in the 360 that waasts on adds… how soon until that viral infection spreads to MCE.
Guess it’s time for a letter to the FCC, like they care about actually protecting consumers :p.