A couple weeks ago I lamented the email I received from #DirecTV bragging about their “simplified and reorganized playlist”. Well it has landed on us like a pallet of bricks.
The emphasis now is to nag us to death about connecting to the Internet so they can destroy our bandwidth by downloading the programs we want to watch instead of sending them to us by satellite. I learned the hard way the other day when I couldn’t use our Internet for an entire day before discovering the damn receiver was downloading shows instead of waiting until they played on the regular TV schedule.
It used to be you could select first Run Only or All. And that meant it would record re-runs as they came up on the regular viewing schedule if you selected All. That option now means they will begin downloading them immediately and kill our Internet.
The only recourse I could find was to turn off the Internet connection. So now the damn thing pops up a demand to connect to the Internet every time I try to do anything with the controller.
On top of all this nonsense, the change in software overloads the cheap processor in the unit so what used to take a moment to choose on a menu now takes several seconds between each button push as it tries to run the bloated programming software they dumped on us. So between the frustrating pop-up every other button push demanding we reconnect to the Internet we have to wait. If I push too many buttons too soon the rotten thing locks up.
More and more programmers simply assume everybody has unlimited lightning fast Internet like they do. Or they just don’t give a damn.
Another aspect of the downloaded programming is that you can’t fast-forward past the commercials. They save money by making you pay for the Internet bandwidth to watch the show and they make money by making sure you have to watch the ads they are paid to force upon you. I suppose the next thing will be they will lock out the ability to fast-forward on all programming. That will be the day we will certainly drop their service. I’m almost tempted to do it now anyway.
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