New TV set-top boxes

[FiberGuy]

Here's the front of one of my new TV boxes

 

 

Here's the back. Notice the RJ45 input  

 

 

 

Here's my new network in the basement. The thin cable going into the ONT at the bottom is the fiber and the thicker cable right next to it is the power coming from the UPS. The top most port on the ONT is the Internet VLAN and the second port is the TV VLAN. You can see that the installer plugged a secondary switch into the TV port, then ran two cables from that switch and punched it into the patch panel. From there, the two TV ports run directly to the set-top boxes. The extra switch is only fast Ethernet, so that means all devices share a 100mb connection to the ONT.

 

 

The features that I get are I can go back and watch TV shows up to 24 hours old(yes, I can FF through commercials), so basic DVR for select channels. I get 14 basic channels, half of them are 1080p. I also get a bunch of free on-demand, which has recent popular TV series and some movies, many on 1080p. All of this for $15/month. For an extra $16/month, I can get full on DVR that allows recording of two of any channels at a time, has an easy interface to track series, even if the series is on different channels. I can even instruct it to ignore episodes that have already been recorded, even if recorded on different channels. Up to 250 hours of storage and anything recorded has no time limit, you can theoretically keep something for years. It is not locally stored, but back at the CO. There is even an android app to manage the DVR over the Internet.

 

Since I only have the basic TV package, I don't think I will be getting the full featured DVR, but I do get a free 3 month trial.

 

When playing around, I noticed that even though I was not using DVR on a given channel and that the channel technically was not one of those "go back 24 hours" channels, if a show was in progress, I could actually jump to the beginning of the show. So auto DVR on most channels, allowing me to watch the beginning of the current show.

 

Ohh, that $15/month covers up to 5 of these boxes. I currently only have two.