Dear WFSB,

Yes, it's snowing. We get that. It's been forecast for several days. And you are showing a playoff football game. Even though it's Baltimore vs Tennessee, some CT residents actually want to sit in their warm, snug houses and, you know watch the game. These people do not need to have approximately 20% of their television screens filled with a crawling listing of all the towns and cities in Connecticut that have overnight parking bans, due to the storm. Oh, look, bingo is cancelled at churches in Milford and Ansonia. And Thomaston still has an overnight parking ban, as does Waterbury.

And, some arcane rule means that, even though Comcast carries WCBS from New York, when WCBS and WFSB have the same programming scheduled, the WFSB feed appears on the channel allocated to WCBS. As a result, the only way I can avoid seeing, yet again, that Stonington has an overnight parking ban, along with Thomaston and Tolland, is to turn off the TV and go shovel some of that snow, or something.

ETA In another instance of the awesome power of an LJ rant, within a few minutes of this posting, WFSB decided that they no longer needed to give screen real estate to a repetitive listing of storm closings.

I suppose I should be grateful that Comcast is willing to provide a pixelated, artefact-ridden video signal with distorted audio for The NHL Network for the World Junior game between Canada and the US. But, somehow, I'm not. Out of all of the digital channels on my system, including the other sports channels that they throw in for free when I pay them $7.99/month for the NHL Network,* this is the only one that they can't manage to keep on the air. I've subscribed to this channel for two months, and this is the second time the channel was unwatchable, and there have been two additional times when there was no signal at all (I suppose that counts as unwatchable as well).

The good news, though, is that by the time I called to complain, so had many others. I'm not the only hockey fan who'd planned to stay in on New Years Eve and watch this heavily bally-hooed game. There were multiple trouble-tickets open on this issue. It's nice that they recognize that hockey fans care about actually seeing hockey, not to mention that if they sell a value-added service for $7.99/month, they ought to actually provide that service. All of the Comcast CSRs I've talked to about problems with the NHL Network have been quite pleasant, as was the tech who came out last week. But that doesn't negate the fact that I can't, ever, count on watching scheduled programming on the NHL Network.

ETA: Picture and sound are back, with 4 minutes to go in the second period, within 2 minutes of my posting. If I'd known I had that power, I would have posted this during the pre-game!

*This is a matter of framing. Comcast would say that they are selling me a package of about a dozen sports channels (NBA-TV, NFL Network, channels dedicated to tennis, NASCAR, college sports, etc.), but, if it weren't for the hockey, I wouldn't be subscribing, so that's what I'm paying for, and, if I watch an occasional hockey game or Thursday night football game, well, they're available, but nothing actually worth subscribing to.