Editorial: Blurry picture
Cablevision is good at annoying people. It’s doing it lately with its clumsy, contradictory signals about its ongoing and oft-delayed conversion to all-digital transmissions.
Grumbling about the company, no matter what it does, is only natural. People will always resent paying a goodly sum every month for their cable service if anything at all about it isn’t total perfection.
Speaking of that “total perfection,” has anybody noticed that Cablevision’s audio is out of sync with the video these days? The words come out a little ahead of the right mouth movements. This annoying phenomenon appeared in one household we know of nearby after the occupants replaced their old cable box with a new one because the old box kept lowering the volume all by itself.
The same people went to the cable store in Southampton also because they had heard the news that everybody, no matter what kind of new digital TV they had, needed a cable box for every TV in the house. Their new little HDTV in the kitchen lacked one; it had been showing programming directly from a cable connection.
As Cablevision’s Joan Gilroy told the Town Board in September, news stories (including the Reporter’s, based on Cablevision’s own PR) were incorrect in telling people that every digital TV in the house needed a box to continue to display programming after Cablevision went all digital. In fact, only people with older digital TVs without “QAM” tuners would need a digital box — to receive basic programming, that is. The company scrambles any service more pricey than that so you’ll need a box to unscramble it, no matter what kind of TV you have.
Now we learn the company still has not made the analog-to-all-digital switch here, despite all the warnings. And it’s back to telling the first version of that story: its PR person repeated the old refrain that everyone will need a box after February 14.
According to Ms. Gilroy, there are about 2,400 Cablevision subscribers on Shelter Island and only 52 or so did not have a cable box in their homes in September. The real hassle and potential expense will hit all those customers who have extra TVs that don’t have boxes. Will they need boxes or not? If they might not, how do they find out for sure? And once they acquire more boxes, when will their monthly rental fee kick in?
Cablevision’s inept PR has muddied the answers. Yes, the subject is technical and a little complicated but the company’s bumbling warnings and explanations haven’t cleared the picture.
