When we first moved to Arizona, I splurged and bought a Tivo. It was an old one, and it was wonderful. Worked great, super intuitive interface, great integration. Back then it had to call Tivo every day to get the latest listings.
In 2006 or so, we went HD, and upgraded to a Series 2 HD, with the cable cards. With the exception of a failed HD in 2012, replaced via Weaknees, it has been wonderful.
At both our places in Arizona, we had Cox cable. It was reliable, reasonable, and it gave us absolutely awesome internet speeds.
Fast forward. We have moved to the San Jose area. Our stuff is still in storage, and we are in temporary housing. The apartment we are in has Comcast Xfinity service. Internet, TV, and telephone.
I guess I should be happy that it has a DVR, but the UI is so fucking primitive, it is painful to use. It is slow, non responsive, and the search function truly sucks ass. Yes, there are lots of channels, but unless you search precisely right, it will not return anything, and then you get to go back to square one.
I can only hope that we have a choice wherever we end up, but I suspect that we will have the choice between Comcast and AT&T U-Verse.
I guess I will once again go back to Tivo.
Why don’t you use Windows Media Center? Get yourself a HD Homerun ( with cablecard ) and you’ve got your own DVR with your own storage. I’ve limited mine to 4 terabytes, but feel free to splurge. The beauty of it is I have xbox 360’s around the house that can stream from it on demand, including live tv.
Because, I am in temporary housing, it isn’t my cable account, so I wouldn’t be able to get cable card(s).
Hell, I wish I had my Xbox360 so I could just do Netflix streaming…
Oh, and for fuck’s sake, Comcast channels here in the bay area have 2 – 3 commercials an hour on every channel I have watched from “Christian Mingle”. Sigh…