"... the easier it is to stop up the drain."
- Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott, USS Enterprise (NCC-1701), Star Trek III: The Search For Spock

This is how I'm feeling at the moment with current digital TV technology, in particular the continuing and exasperating problems we're having at Te Whare Mayfurr - how the hell did watching TV in the 21st century become so spoilt for choice and yet so riddled with issues?

It didn't used to be like this. Some of you of a similar age to this Humble Correspondent may remember that back in the day TV service was simpler - hoist up a suitable antenna, point it at the local transmitter, turn on the set and wait for it to warm up, tune in the TV to the station and boom! you had a TV station being broadcast into your home. If you were lucky, you could even pick up more than one station if you were close enough to the relevant transmitters - or, in the case of my childhood in Fairlie, your father rigged up a TV antenna array fit for a NASA tracking station to pull in weak signals from a transmitter 200km away. And in the 70s, if you were very lucky (i.e. rich), TV was in colour. As long as the TV or the antenna didn't actually break you were pretty much guaranteed service.

Then along came analogue cable TV, which I switched to after moving to Wellington. Even more channels, including ad-free (then!) pay-TV channels, all through a set-top box that connnected to a physical network cable instead of to an antenna? Sweet! Okay, you had to synch your VCR timer to the set-top channel selector timer if you wanted to record a particular programme, but it wasn't that much of a bother. And the box itself was rock-solid stable.

Next was digital cable TV - and hoo boy, that's where troubles began. For a start, the first set-top box seemed less robust than the analogue one as it started requiring "IT Help Desk Procedure #1" (a.k.a. "Turn it off then on again"), but as this wasn't required very frequently it was tolerable. Then we were "upgraded" to a new digital TVR which gave us EVEN MORE CHANNELS and eliminated the need for a VCR and gave digital HDMI output to our flat-screen TV, but with the increased functionality came more frequent uses of ITHDP#1 to fix the inevitable lock-ups. But even when service was running, there would be some occasions where the picture would go "blocky" or "stutter" with digital signal degredation which we could do nothing about - the digital TV signal being delivered through separate lower-speed cable modems to our hybrid-fibre-coax (HFC) high speed broadband service. So at this point I was noting that in the bad old analogue days the picture might be fuzzy on occasion due to atmospherics, but even that was more watchable than some artifact-laden digital signal that just stopped until the buffering had caught up...

And to add insult to injury, the pay-channels started having bloody advertisements in them.

And finally, in the present day we got further "upgraded" from the digital TVR to "Internet TV" - a small notebook-sized box that was receiving cable TV content via the high-speed broadband network. Not only could you now use this to watch online services like "TVNZ On Demand" and "YouTube", it was wirelessly connected to the network - no more dedicated cables, everything ran through the complimentary wireless mesh network back to the router hub and cable modem. Sweet! And it was... until the set-top box in the lounge started requiring multiple applications of ITHDP#1 (and being threatened with applications of "Adjuster #1", a.k.a hammer) just to get the blasted thing started and connected to the network. And despite the rest of the home internet network being fine, our provider insisted on sendin a new router hub and an additional wireless mesh network hub instead of a replacement set-top box - mostly because our provider had decided to drop the entire Internet TV service in September and pass us off to the main NZ satellite TV service instead. I think I may have fixed it by moving one mesh hub to be next to the set-top and using a spare ethernet cable to connect the set-top to the hub, hopefully I'll find out over the next few days.

So to recap: in the old days if something went wrong with TV service, it was usually an antenna problem or just reception conditions that would usually rectify themselves. Now, it could be a set-top issue, or a wireless connection issue, or a hub issue, or an internet issue, or... !!!

Is having a TV that works consistently when you switch it on so hard to do? grrrr

Yeah yeah, I know... "first world problems"... :-)