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Glynne wrote:

Let me reassure all of you about LOT8s.  AT&T will never do it!  How do I know?  Simple, AT&T has shown themselves to be notoriously cheap. They depend on 40+ year old copper to deliver their video IP service, rather than deploy fiber.  Saves money for bonuses for the CxOs and pay off the CWA.  But, in the long run, would save them service costs.  We've had 6 visits from AT&T in the past 1 1/2 years.  In the same time period we had the cable company out twice.  Once for the hook up and once for take down.  Also LOT8s (as traditionally installed, anyway) would require an IntelliStar at each VHO plus a dish, satellite receiver and encoder.  That all costing ~$20K + labor and taking ~10U rack space.  Each IntelliStar likely costs $2500.  I don’t know how many VHOs AT&T has but 200+ would still be a lot.  Sure AT&T could come up with some alternative method of providing the same overlay data but the development costs would also be high.  Since the IntelliStar is more or less a PC, that kind of power is not In the STBs so using them to do it is out.  Some have asked why TWC does not pay for the box.  Every other cable company had to pay TWC for their IntelliStar (formally WeatherStar) why should AT&T be any different?  It’s back to them being cheap.  They want to be a cable company w/o being considered a cable company.  Cuts costs down.  Mind you, we don’t see these savings!

 

Solutions?  We could revolt, calling in asking for it, writing letters or (what AT&T would most listen to) unsubscribe.  But I don’t think enough of you are that serious to make that happen.  So there we are.  AT&T is too cheap to make it happen and we the customer are not active enough to show AT&T we care.

 

As for me, LOT8s would be nice but quite frankly since the parent company of NBC bought TWC back in 2007 their service has become more about entertainment and less about weather.  I so wish AccuWeather would start their own channel but I don’t think they’ll do it.  I don’t think the market can support 2 weather channels and getting cable companies to carry your channel is a big uphill climb.  Though it would be nice to see some of those (babes) who left TWC back on the air.  <smile>  On an unrelated matter how much could be take of Jim kosek?   <hehe>  Because of all of this I have not watched TWC in a while.

 

FYI, I really don’t work for TWC. AT&T, a cable company or any of their contractors or competitors.  What I know is from research on the internet and general electronic knowledge.

 

Glynne

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Really,  how is that working out for Verizon. They underestimated the cost of FTTP and are paying the price for it.  Copper still has lots of useful life left.

Leave a service just because you don't get weather reports every 8 minutes? Wow, I can think of much better excuses to leave a provider than that.  TWC has gone downhill in the past several years and LOT8s has never really impressed me, even when I had it, can't say that I ever tuned to it.