Mark Lyn­der­say

A cou­ple of months ago, Flow kind­ly switched me to their new Ad­vanced Video Ser­vices, a suite of IP based tech­nolo­gies de­signed to launch the com­pa­ny's ca­ble TV of­fer­ings ful­ly in­to the 21st cen­tu­ry, giv­ing me a month to test the ser­vice be­fore ask­ing me to choose my pack­age.

I chose the Ba­sic pack­age, the sec­ond tier of their four tiers of ser­vices at a cost of $275 per month. Prices range from $180 for their 44 chan­nel starter pack­age to a pre­mi­um pack­age ($479) with the sports and en­ter­tain­ment choic­es that would meet the needs of most house­holds.I'll ad­mit to hav­ing a bit of a unique sit­u­a­tion here, though I sus­pect every home has their view­ing quirks. The man­age­ment is up­set at not be­ing able to ac­cess Bloomberg with­out pay­ing $84.

The wee tyrant would prob­a­bly en­joy the Fam­i­ly Time pack­age, adding $30 to the month­ly bill.I watch lo­cal news on ca­ble on the sec­ond box in my home of­fice and the one time I tried the "Play from Be­gin­ning" func­tion of the new sys­tem on a lo­cal news show, it sim­ply didn't work.This is al­so an adamant­ly stan­dard de­f­i­n­i­tion house­hold, and up­grades to the view­ing ex­pe­ri­ence aren't cur­rent­ly sched­uled.

That's been an­oth­er part of the ex­pe­ri­ence. If your sig­nal isn't leav­ing Flow's new set-top box via its HD­MI port, you're go­ing to catch hell try­ing to work with the new menus and chan­nel se­lec­tion sys­tem, which is not op­ti­mised for low­er res­o­lu­tion screens.Ac­tivist Col­in Robin­son con­tact­ed me soon af­ter switch­ing to share his ex­pe­ri­ences, which close­ly track my own.

"As a sub­scriber to Flow's HDTV and old disc-based PVR, I'm deeply dis­ap­point­ed I switched," he ex­plains."A sin­gle but­ton no longer turns on TV and ca­ble box, and you can't just rewind a show in progress–that's now a six key­stroke af­fair, in­stal­la­tion took two vis­its, and I still have sig­nal strength and guide is­sues."

"The biggest hit was my 87-year-old moth­er stopped watch­ing TV on her own–she just couldn't use the all-black, small-but­ton re­mote and on-screen menus, every chan­nel num­ber she had mem­o­rised had changed, and scrolling favourites is no longer a one-but­ton af­fair."Robin­son doc­u­ment­ed his ex­pe­ri­ences in more de­tail here: http://ow.ly/MEpHm.

In con­trast, lec­tur­er and com­put­ing ex­pert Si­mon Fras­er thor­ough­ly en­joys the new ser­vice.In an on­line con­ver­sa­tion about his ex­pe­ri­ences, he gave his moth­er's ex­pe­ri­ence with the ser­vice a C rat­ing and his own a "high B." Flow's cus­tomer ser­vice won a D mi­nus."Pic­ture qual­i­ty is quite good in both lo­ca­tions, and the num­ber of HD chan­nels is de­cent," Fras­er ex­plained, "price is al­so pret­ty good."

"The box suf­fers from some UI Prob­lems when com­pared with my old set-top box but that's part­ly me get­ting ac­cus­tomed to a new sys­tem. I al­so think that the de­fi­cien­cies could be reme­died by a firmware up­grade.""This dig­i­tal ser­vice is prob­a­bly very sen­si­tive to line qual­i­ty," he ex­plained af­ter I de­scribed by is­sues with the ser­vice.

Those prob­lems in­clude ser­vice dropouts last­ing hours that ini­tial­ly de­fied re­sets of both the SIM card in the box, and cus­tomer sup­port prob­ing of the sys­tem.Even­tu­al­ly, ser­vice re­turns af­ter such episodes but con­tin­u­ous­ly restart­ing the box and even un­plug­ging it feels more like 1990's com­put­ing than 21st cen­tu­ry ca­ble ser­vice.

Over the last two weeks, I've ac­tu­al­ly stopped both­er­ing to un­der­stand the ser­vice. I run my sig­nal in­to a de­vice that al­lows my serv­er to act as a DVR, and I've been ex­plor­ing the qual­i­ty of cur­rent over-the-air (OTA) sig­nals us­ing mod­ern flat re­cep­tion dig­i­tal an­ten­nae which can be as cheap as US$10 and look far more hip than rab­bit ears.

I'm go­ing to have to mount the an­ten­na out­side the old, thick con­crete walls here, but I'm get­ting re­al­ly good sig­nal from CNC3, fair re­cep­tion of the Par­lia­ment chan­nel and have to cross my fin­gers about the flaky sig­nals from CTV and TV6.I'm go­ing to re­turn the Flow box con­nect­ed to my home of­fice, and the one in the liv­ing room is on the fir­ing line. Be­hind the trig­ger is a Roku.