Though the problem seemed to begin on Friday with our Comcast cable TV service, we didn’t much care until the family sat down to watch the 82nd Academy Awards and the video stuttering and audio dropouts were so horrifically bad that it was almost unwatchable.
Rebooting the device during a commercial break was a mistake since it took forever to come back up and didn’t fix the problem, so I grabbed my iPhone and did a search on Twitter for the word “comcast” to see if it could possibly be a network issue rather than our cable DVR failing.
I was stunned to see that there were dozens of people tweeting about the “stuttering” and “pixelation” of video and audio and it appeared that most of the problem was in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis/St. Paul and the surrounding metro area (see SheilaBird; KeinKernMusic; DFRevert; CSWebGrl).
But in further investigation this morning, I’ve discovered that many of the people tweeting were in Illinois (e.g., JoshMeans) so this might’ve been a regional problem. During the Oscar telecast I reached out to Frank Eliason via Twitter (@ComcastCares and he’s Comcast’s “Twitter man” according to BusinessWeek) and he was, with his typical Johnny-on-the-spot follow up, checking into the issues but nothing has come of it yet. I’ve reached out to him this morning to ask for a statement about what went wrong, what Comcast did and is doing about it, and Eliason responded by asking for a private, Twitter direct message (DM) with my email address in it, so we’ll see what Comcast says about the issue and I’ll update this post if-and-when I receive something.
I suspect that this sort of “fail” is going to become more frequent, rather than less so, since more of us are maximizing the use of our wired and wireless internet connections and the cable companies are accelerating the services they’re trying to shove down an internet broadband pipe that — while admittedly fat and robust with seemingly high capacity — is still a finite resource.
March 8th, 2010 at 9:21 am
I am adding my name to the list of complainants. I experienced the same issues, but I thought it was my box. Because I was not watching real-time (trying to fast forward through commercial and long thank you’s), I did not dare re-booting the machine. Now I understand it was a widespread problem.
March 8th, 2010 at 9:38 am
Several of the people I read on Twitter last night were complaining that they set their DVR’s to record, came in to the Oscar telecast an hour or so into it, and it was blank! THAT would be even more of a bummer since struggling to watch stuttering and pixelating video with the “er…ot….oot…” of audio dropping out is preferable to missing it entirely.
March 8th, 2010 at 5:08 pm
Frank got in touch with me during the Oscar telecast and checked my box (no problem) and did report the issue. It is something we have had an issue with before but it was specifically noticeable during the Academy Award broadcast. At least I did get the reply from Frank, though no remedy seemed to be available last night.
March 8th, 2010 at 5:26 pm
Fiona: Yep…Frank Eliason’s followup is great. He also checked my box though I was clear other channels were affected, I’d rebooted the box, and he came back with “no errors seen”.
I’ve had the issue too previously but has been quite intermittent. Perhaps bringing this to their attention so adamantly might get it more attention.
March 8th, 2010 at 9:39 pm
I suspected it was a Comcast issue; had crazy bad problems during the summer Olympics a while back.
Can you tell @comcastcares that we don’t want him to do a DM just to you, because we would all like to know what the deal is? And at the rates we pay we should certainly be able to expect a Service Level Agreement (SLA) of sorts. They don’t deliver, we don’t pay. Seems fair.
March 8th, 2010 at 9:58 pm
Couldn’t agree more Jennifer. In fact, you should tweet this to Frank Eliason @comcastcares right now!