One Box To Solve Them All

         

Over the past year or so I've noticed a slow but unmistakeable decline in my TV watching experience.

What with NFL Sunday Ticket and a zillion streaming services along with cable and internet, I don't want to sit down with a calculator and add up just how much I pay to watch all these games and movies and shows but I know it's a lot.

My hardware: 2007 Kuro 50" plasma HDTV, 10-year-old Comcast cable box modem; Apple TV 4K (3rd Generation, November 2022); tvOS 27.2.

I keep the ancient TV because its fantastic, almost 3D picture at 1080p is still better than any 4K screen I've looked at since.

Below, details of my gradually decaying media presentation, all of which travels through the described hardware — I never watch TV direct from my cable box, rather I use the Xfinity app on Apple TV.

That way I only have to deal with one remote — though Apple's is a total FAIL IMHO, but I'll save that for another time.

• The biggest problem watching stuff is that it freezes for no apparent reason — sometimes for a few seconds, sometimes ongoing to the point I have to leave my game or whatever and click back to where I originally clicked on to watch. That usually, but not always, fixes it, sometimes for just a minute and more often for hours.

When freezes happen, I get that circular ring of white rectangles that goes around and around and around.

• When I watch Xfinity and click on a channel in the guide I sometimes get 

        Playback could not proceed. Error message xyz.

This only happens when I want to watch the lower number channels, like ABC/CBS/NBC 3/4/5 etc. at the top of the onscreen guide.

But guess what? When I then scroll to those same channels in the 800s — 803/804/805 — they play just fine.

• The ESPN Saturday college football grid function is janky, and rarely works the way it's supposed to. It did before; now games don't show up where directed but instead I get that circular pattern of dissolving/reappearing little white rectangles as described above in some or all of the grid boxes.

• When watching games on a multitude of iPad screens along with the TV, when the TV freezes the iPad screens freeze and go dark for as long as the TV remains frozen. 

This tells me that the problems isn't just my TV and Apple TV but rather an issue with my internet and modem, since the iPads are independent of the TV setup but rely on the same Comcast internet connection.

I've got one last card to play before I bite the bullet and arrange for Comcast to upgrade my modem as it's been offering to do for many years: tomorrow my new Apple TV 4K Gen 4 arrives.

I'm hoping that somehow, as if by magic, it will solve all my problems related to TV watching, and that any future freezes will be confined to my iPads when configured as described above.

Otherwise the pain of dealing with Comcast to arrange for one of their techs to come to my house to install its up-to-date 2026 modem, pictured up top, will have to be faced.

They tell me they'll send me the new modem for free and that I can easily install it but I know that is simply not true.

Far better to pay $250 for their tech to make the change.