EDITOR
Allison Druin
allisond@umiacs.umd.edu
And that, in many other counties, the customers
don’t need to go through a program guide first to
get to the TV channels, but in our county, they do.
I’m really not sure how either of these explanations
in any way relates to what happened to my grandparents. Are you saying that they should just start
ignoring Washington, DC, news because Comcast
says so? Or should they move to Baltimore County,
so that they can have an easier-to-use set-top box?
I asked the person from Comcast if they had
remote controls that would be easier for older
users. He said that he thought that they might,
somewhere, but he wasn’t sure. He then called
his dispatcher, who said that rung a bell but
didn’t think there were any in stock. So he called
someone else, who said they placed an order for
a senior-friendly remote. He said he had no idea
when it would arrive, because he didn’t know
where it needed to be ordered from. So they didn’t
have any in stock, the employees of Comcast didn’t
know that it was a choice, and they mentioned
the senior-friendly remote control only because I
pressed them about the availability of one. This
might be one of those technically-this-is-possible-but-it-won’t-really-happen moments. We’re still
waiting to hear back from Comcast about the
remote. I’m not holding my breath.
As you’re reading this, if you know some of the
major players in the cable-TV market in my area,
you might be thinking, “Jonathan, why don’t you
just switch them over to Verizon FIOS for their
cable service?” Because Verizon requires a very
similar set-top box, with another complex remote
control. I actually think that the on-screen guides
from Verizon have better fonts, but that’s really
a moot point, because my grandparents refuse to
switch to Verizon FIOS. Why? When you switch to
Verizon FIOS for cable TV, they change your phone
service. Your phone doesn’t work like before. If
there is a power outage, your phone service doesn’t
work (which it used to do). Except that Verizon
installs a battery backup, so that your phone will
work for only eight hours (or something similar)
when the power goes out. The idea of not having
phone service (or having it work for only a few
hours) is incredibly frightening to people in their
80s and 90s. In addition, I think that my grandparents lived through a few long blackouts during
their time in New York City. They have said, “
absolutely NO changes to our phone service. Period. We
simply won’t discuss it.”
So my thought was to just update them to a
TV with a digital tuner (the Comcast worker told
me that no TVs have digital tuners, but clearly he
was wrong). I tried that, but the four stations that
are supposedly in digital did not come through,
even with a digital tuner. So it’s not just a matter
of a digital tuner, maybe Comcast is encoding it
somehow so you can only receive the signal with
a set-top box? If the TV-with-digital-tuner idea
had worked, I would have just purchased a few
different remotes (or used older remotes that my
grandparents have) and tried to program those
older remotes to work with the new TVs.” But wait;
a new problem has occurred. Comcast recently
changed all of its channel numbers. So local channels 11 and 13 (which have been available on 11
and 13 on cable for years) will now be available on
191 and 192 or something similar. I could program
those channels as favorites, but to do so, I would
need to use the Comcast set-top box and remote
control… never mind! And I can see more problems
ahead. The transition to broadcast digital TV in the
USA is coming in 2009, and I think there are going
to be many people who are confused, upset, frustrated, and disappointed.
Clearly, this company, and this industry, doesn’t
know its users. Think about it. The older someone
gets and the more infirmities they have, the more
likely it is that they’ll be spending time at home,
watching TV. The best customers are likely to be
customers in their 80s or 90s, who may watch a lot
of TV. Don’t worry about teenagers. They can figure out how to use a remote control. But customers
in their 80s and 90s cannot.
It was clear from my
experiences that no
one at Comcast had
thought of this, or
really cared. But it’s
not just the
cable companies.