Why I Fucking Hate Time Warner Cable, Reason 273

We aren’t huge TV watchers. We switched to basic cable only, because all we care to get in digital format is the major networks. We don’t need to rent a digital box, because the major networks are sent in “Clear QAM”, which means any digital TV can display them without decoding. This arrangement worked great until about a month ago, when they decided that we were getting too much for our money.

lg-tvNow, they’ve decided to take the HD signals for the major networks and down-convert them to SD. We still get the channel, but it’s in the old 4:3 format, with a shitty picture. The best part? The digital signal is still HD, so they have to re-up-convert the channel to HD for our TV to see it at all. So, first, they squeeze down the 16:9 HD channel so it fit in an SD format, leaving empty black bars at the top and the bottom of the picture. THEN, they stretch the crappy, low-res signal back up into an HD signal, leaving big gray bars on the left and right of the picture.

So, we still get the channels, but they live in a little box in the middle of the screen. Not only do we get shitty quality, but we also get it provided in a format that I have to reprogram the TV to display EVERY FREAKING TIME we want to watch broadcast TV, unless we want to squint to see it.

Awful customer service and unbelievable price increases pushed us to drop first HBO and then extended service. Apparently they think that also giving us low quality will push us back to buying that stuff?

Fucking defects…