2024 Retrospective

I, like many old people, subscribe to cable. It's what we do. I record things, mostly from Turner Classic Movies, to watch when the mood strikes me. I don’t hoard them. I delete after viewing, but I record faster than I can watch. Much faster. This problem was occasionally “solved” when my rental DVR would crap the bed and I would have to start over. When my cable provider offered me a “cloud” DVR option, I jumped on it.

I didn’t want my year end wrap-up to be a rant, but here we are. On November 12th my cable provider sent an email exclaiming “Your Cloud DVR is getting a future-forward upgrade”. A consequence of this upgrade is that “Content recorded before August‌ 11 will be removed as part of this update”. The benefits of the upgrade, however, are that “Any content recorded after August ‌11 will remain available to you” and “we’re excited about the improvements this update will bring”, so I have that. This mass deletion was scheduled for December 11. Already angry that films were being deleted one year after record, which was not disclosed when I upgraded, I called to complain. That resulted in bupkis.

When the mass deletions did not occur, I was cautiously optimistic. But on January 8th, Cox Communications fulfilled their promise. I had binged a few films before the deadline, but ignoring the films that had already expired, I lost about forty films. Some that TCM seldom runs.

I could, in the future, prioritize films that are approaching the one year mark, and re-record when available, but the only channel I give a crap about is TCM. Paying for a full suite of channels for one doesn’t make sense. There is no streaming equivalent. There is YouTube TV, but they also expire films, sometimes faster than one year. Also their user interface is aggressively terrible.

But one thing I can count on is that this will happen again. Cox Communications hates their customers. About six or seven years ago a truck caught and yanked down overhead wires, cable and power both. Three or four houses lost service. Verizon got my neighbors back online within hours. Several calls to Cox resulted in several promises to have some out there soon. When nobody ever showed, I learned they had no record of my calls and I would be down for the weekend. One ass insisted he could send a signal to my cable box despite the cable lying in the street. At least they promised to prorate my bill for one week. They didn’t, but they promised to.

I realize nobody wants to read all this, but almost literally nobody reads the blog at all. I paired the rant down from ten paragraphs. Anyhow, my favorite movie this year was either The Last of Sheila or The Bad and the Beautiful (another reason to hate the selection of The Greatest Show). The worst was High Society, which was just dumb. Two best pictures, one silent film, one foreign language film, two musicals, three Westerns, and four Christmas films. Changes are ahead.