Gadgets

UPDATED (Updates within body of post)

I’ve had Sigecom (which was recently bought by the horribly named company, Wow!- it stands for ‘Wide Open West’) cable since 2001. I’m a TV junkie, so moving from a small town with 33 channels to a bigger city with a cable company that offered a digital set-top box and 200+ channels was heaven to me. I remember when we moved in and I just watched TV for a week straight. I had little else to do at the time due to some changes I was making personally and professionally (so to speak).

I recently decided, thanks to a phone call from direct sales, to switch to Insight cable to save $15 a month. I’ve had Insight’s superior cable modem service since 2002 (I tried Sigecom, and they were terrible- poor service, lots of downtime, utterly clueless tech support, you name it.)

The two companies (Insight and Wow) are sort of a mixed bag together. It’s like having the best of both worlds if you had pieces from one company and pieces from the other. I wanted to take a bit to compare the two companies in the Evansville area (the channel lineup will be different in other areas, and for all I know- they might use different software and hardware in different markets.) So, what follows fits for my area, and might not fit for yours.

Wow! has stuck with the same layout, look, guide, menus, etc as we’ve had with Sigecom. Nothing has changed outside of the new name and new logos all over the place. Sigecom’s layout, menus, software and hardware, have gone unchanged for at least 3 years when they did some minor changes to the software used for the STB’s (set top boxes).

Let’s start off with the channel lineup. This is where Insight shines on the face of it all. Insight has a number of high def channels they just added that Wow! currently lacks. When I EMailed them as a customer to ask if they had plans to add any more HD channels- well, they didn’t respond to my query, even though it says they reply to every EMail within 2 business days. I guess that’s a tick against their customer service.

Wow! has the following HD channels in one HD package-

802 – PBS HD
811 – ABC HD
872 – HBO HD
804 – NBC HD
818 – A&E HD
874 – SHO HD
808 – FOX HD
819 – Big Ten HD
876 – Starz HD
810 – CBS HD
812 – HDNet HD
827 – ESPN HD
839 – HGTV HD
813 – HDNet Movies
829 – ESPN2 HD
843 – Food Network HD
821 – NFL Network HD
836 – HD Theater
871 – Universal HD

A decent lineup of HD channels. More than a most cable companies offer from what I have been able to tell. To get those channels, you have to have digital cable with a digital box. Starz! is included as part of the digital package, so the Starz! HD channel is included. Insight charges $10 a month for the Starz package, so no included Starz HD channel. But, Insight has the following HD channels Wow! doesn’t have- (Insight has all the HD channels above plus these extras):

[UPDATE/CORRECTION: Insight does NOT have all of the HD channels listed above. I noticed today that they actually don't carry HGTV HD or Food Network HD.]

TNT HD

National Geographic HD

Animal Planet HD

TLC HD

Discovery Channel HD (this is an HD mirror of the actual Discovery Channel, which is different than Discovery HD Theatre)

TBS HD

MHD (Music HD from MTV, VH1, and CMT)

So, 7 HD channels that Wow! doesn’t have. Pretty impressive. Having an HD TV, this was a big deal for me. All of these channels are 5.1- though the mixing on Discovery, TLC, and Animal Planet are a bit off- the vocal track comes from center, right, and left which is annoying- have yet to figure out of it’s the cable company or the source.

Discovery HD is a nice bonus- it’s cool to see Mythbusters in HD. I even watched a few episodes of Dirty Jobs, which I rarely watch- just to see it in HD. TLC, Animal Planet, and National Geographic I could care less about. I do like TBS HD though. My Boys and Family Guy and Ten Items or Less in High definition. Very cool.

Overall, Insight has a better lineup than Wow! outside of HD as well. Insight has GSN (game show network) that Wow! lacks. Here are some other channels Insight has that Wow! doesn’t have:

Si TV
GSN
CSPAN 3
iLife
Fuse
Sleuth
Versus

Nothing to write home about if you ask me, outside of GSN which is awesome. I’ve been bugging Sigecom for years to pick this channel up somehow. Sleuth looks decent, and Versus is the home of Dennis Miller’s new show, so that’s cool as well. The others are bonuses, but not a huge deal.

As I mentioned before- Wow! includes Starz as part of their digital package. This is very nice. Something Insight is lacking. Insight charges $10 a month for the package of 8 Starz channels. Both Insight and Wow! have all the same Starz channels. (an east coast feed of Starz, a west coast feed of Starz, Starz Cinema east and west, Starz Comedy, Inblack, Starz Edge, and Starz Kids and Family.)

So, the downside here is with Insight and it’s pricing packages. I also noticed an issue with Insight’s premium channel lineup compared to Wow! It’s considerably smaller in some areas. I have Showtime (which was free for 1 year), but none of the others right now. I used to have all the premium channels for a few years but got rid of most of them. I do notice, however, that Insight only has 4 channels of Cinemax, whereas Wow! has 8! Insight is lacking the following Cinemax channels that Wow! carries and has carried for years:

WMax (Women)
OuterMX
@Max
5StarMax

Another tick against Insight’s lineup.

Both companies have all of the available HBO channels. BUT- Wow! has a east and west coast feed of HBO Comedy and both east and west coast feeds of HBO Zone. So, they have 2 extra feeds of HBO.

Now, onto Showtime. Again, Insight is lacking where Wow! has all the available networks Showtime has to offer. This was a big disappointment to me, as I will be missing out on some good stuff.

Insight has Showtime, Showtime Extreme, Showtime Beyond, ShowCase, and Showtime Too.
Problem is- Wow! has all of these plus these following Showtime channels that Insight doesn’t offer:

Showtime Family Zone
ShoNext (GREAT channel)
Showtime Women

So, 3 channels of Showtime that Insight lacks.

I’ll add this, just because I happen to be comparing the only channel guides for Wow! and Insight- Wow! offers a number of adult channels. It seems that Insight has these all contained within the OnDemand service. I could be wrong, but I haven’t seen anything about adult channels. So, if you’re into that sort of thing- Wow! might be a better service.

Both companies offer Music Choice digital music channels. From what I can tell, it’s the same exact lineup of channels for both.

Next is where Insight outshines Wow! on a massive scale. The selections within OnDemand. Wow!’s selection is just pitiful compared to what Insight offers, and truthfully the plethora of choices from the OnDemand section is what attracted me to Insight months ago.

Wow! offers the following on demand services- HBO, Starz, Showtime, Cinemax anime! network, WWE, HereTV (gay and lesbian), Food Network, ABC News, History Channel, A&E, PBS Sprout, Disney, Toon Disney, HGTV, and I think that’s about it. They offer a sampling of spanish language programming and some generic storytime stuff for kids as well as a small selection of magazine-type offerings.

Insight, on the other hand, offers nearly 10 pages of OnDemand selections including, but not limited to- TBS, CNN, Fuse, Versus, HGTV, Food Network, MTV, VH1, CMT, Cartoon Network, Adult Swim, Nickelodeon, Noggin, The-N, RipeTV, TNT, and much much more.

They have so many pages of OnDemand offerings, I can’t even remember them all. Now, maybe Wow! is at capacity or something, but there’s just no excuse for having such a tiny selection here. Granted, Sigecom only started their on demand service less than 2 years ago (Insight has had it at least 5 years), but still- give me a break. There’s ultimately no excuse that would satisfy me. When I asked if they were going to add new ondemand programs, they didn’t reply to that EMail other.

So, Insight blows away Wow! with their on demand services. Completely.

I think that just about covers the programming aspect of things, so let’s move onto menus, guides, functionality.

Menus- this is where Wow! shines and Insight makes me want to toss my box out the window. Wow! has a nice clean look to their menus- everything is fast to respond, you can quickly move thru the guide and customize your settings, CC’s, SAP, and much more easily. You don’t have to do a lot of searching- it’s all in one place. In the guide view, Wow! even has a logo for each network next to the channel name- this is VERY helpful. The logo shows up in the guide view, as well as other menus, and it even shows up when you hit the info button on each channel. It’s an easy way to see a graphic to know which channel you’re on and which is which- Insight has very short abbreviations for some of the channels with no logos at all- this makes it hard sometimes to even figure out what channel you’re looking at in the guide. Insight’s menus and settings are buried under a thousand layers of nonsense. It takes forever to do anything with the way it’s all set up. Plus, Insight is clunky and slower than Wow!. Insight does do a better job with the listings in general- they use TV Guide. Not sure what service Wow! uses, but often times you can’t get full episode info. with Wow! where this doesn’t seem to be a problem with Insight.

I should note hardware. Wow! uses Scientific Atlanta boxes. I had the HD/DVR model- Explorer 8300HD. It has a 160GB hard drive. Insight has the Motorola DCT6412 which has a smaller 120 GB hard drive. Both have digital audio out as well as optical audio out and HDMI. I asked Wow! about the output for an added SATA drive, but they said it wasn’t active. Not sure if Insight has this active or not.

The Wow! remote is much easier to navigate, the buttons are where they should be- they’re not too big and not too small…it just fits well in your hand and it makes sense. The Insight remote is a different story- it’s a bit of a mess in some regards. Things are harder to find and the buttons are too crammed together.

Now, onto DVR functionality. Wow! wins this hands down. Insight’s DVR functionality is a complete disaster. With the Explorer box, you can hit a remote button to bring up your DVR section. You can hit 1 button to see recorded shows on the hard drive, another button on the remote next to it shows future recordings, and a third button next to this shows series recordings. You can edit all of this with buttons on the remote that are all in the same area. Play, Rewind, FFWd, etc. are all right near the middle for easy access.

With the Motorola box from Insight- you can hit 1 button to get to your DVR area, but it only shows you what is recorded already. Where Wow! shows a program currently recording with a big red record dot next to it, Insight does no such thing- you have to look at the box itself to see an orange light. Outside of that you have no way to stop a recording outside of deleting it from what I can tell. Silly.

Unlike Wow!, on the motorola box, to get to future recordings or series, you have to go to menu then scroll over to DVR to get to it all. Instead of a few buttons to delete a future record or change the settings, it’s a matter of going thru layer after laye of menus to do anything or make any changes. This is a major pain that motorola needs to fix if it wants to compete with Scientific Atlanta in this regard.

So, the box, the layout, the guide, the menus- the winner is definitely Wow! It’s cleaner, it’s easier, it’s faster, it’s just better.

As for customer service- so far Insight has been a pain. I ordered ALL the digital channels from the guy with direct sales. I found that I didn’t get ALL the channels. There was a $12 package I didn’t get. It was supposed to bring my modem price down $10, but that only happened with this $12 package. I had to argue with the lady to get her to see the logic of all of this. I didn’t feel like being treated like an idiot when she told me “maybe you were confused and when he said “digital channels” you thought he meant the manner in which the channels are delivered.” I wanted to smack her thru the phone, as only an idiot would confuse the two! Direct sales isn’t 100% honest it seems. I had to call about issues with channels I was supposed to get but wasn’t getting about 7 times that first day. I also had to spend around 2 hours talking to no less than 8 different customer service reps about figuring out how on earth to turn off the closed captioning. I was told by one woman that she assured me their boxes did NOT send out CC’s, it was ALL within the TV. Nonsense! I tried to explain to her I had my TV CC’s turned on and it was doubling them all- which meant it was being sent from the box and showing up on the box AND the TV. Finally, after getting all the wrong information, I talked to a woman who said “turn off the box, THEN hit “menu” to find the CC menu.” Why this was a good idea to hide the CC option- I’ve no idea, but it’s just plain stupid.

The verdict? If both companies were to merge into one and offer the best of each- it’d be a perfect match. The easy guides and menus from Wow! with the added HD and OnDemand of Insight. One can only dream. The winner, overall, is Insight I think. The added HD channels along with the massive library of OnDemand offerings as well as GSN and other channels Wow! lacks- one can look past the poor dvr functionality and the awful menus for these features, I think.

UPDATE (Jan 1, 2008): I noticed a few channels from Wow! that Insight doesn’t carry. They include ABC News Network, CNBC World, Daystar, and BYU TV. I believe Insight also lacks SHOP NBC, but I’m not 100% sure on that.

Another small update- I’ve noticed a glitch with Insight’s motorola DVR box. It won’t let me cancel future recordings properly. For some reason, it will only let me cancel some of them…if I try to cancel two in a row, it reprograms the first record to actually record again. If I go back and delete this one, it sets up the second record to actually record. Another thing- even when you cancel a record, it still populates the list but shows a red record dot with lines through it. Rather annoying. Not sure if it’s the hardware in general or if I have a faulty box…will look into this.

UPDATE 2: I found a solution (sort of) to the issue of not being able to delete all future recordings you want to get rid of:

“Simultaneous series recording cancellation problem, aka whack-a-mole
Description If you have two Series recordings scheduled at the same time (i.e. two events of separate full-season recordings at once), and you want to cancel them, it will let you cancel one OR the other, but not both. I.e. if you cancel show #1 @ 8pm it shows up as ‘Negated’ as soon as you say ‘Don’t record this episode’. But if you attempt to cancel show #2 also @ 8pm, that works… but then show #1 shows up as to-be-recorded again.
Remedy: If you cancel the recordings by going though the standard guide instead of the DVR scheduled recordings listing, it should allow you to cancel both recordings. Use one of the following methods to find the scheduled recordings in the IPG:
Press the MyDVR button, select Scheduled Recordings, highlight one of the recordings you want to cancel, then press the GUIDE button.
While watching TV, press the GUIDE button, then scroll to the scheduled recording.
Press the MENU button twice, select ‘TV listings by channel’, then scroll to the scheduled recording.
Note: This remedy does not appear to work on iGuide 74.53-3321. ”
source

Unfortunately- I guess my box has the version of iGuide listed as this doesn’t appear to work. Hopefully this issue is resolved with a future update, as it’s annoying. If I was on vacation or something (out of town), it’d mean I’d miss any number of records due to the fact that this box has such a small hard drive and HD content gobbles up so much of it so quickly.

UPDATE (Jan 5, 2008): I notice that Insight also lacks a STARZ HD feed. Wow! has had this channel for quite some time now…

I also received a reply from Insight’s customer service when I queried them about Showtime Women, Showtime Next, and Showtime Family Zone. I have pasted it below. (bummer)

Regarding your request to carry Showtime Women, Showtime Next, or Showtime Family Zone: we do not have any plans to pick up these channels at this time, although if we do receive enough requests for additional channels it would be something considered in the future.
We apologize for any inconvenience.