Microsoft IPTV Sucks sooooo much! And ATT does too.

Since January of this year, I have been using Microsoft IPTV based equipment by Motorola.  The service it runs on – AT&T Fiber Optic.  The download speed it absorbs per box – 6 Mb/s.  How good it works- not so priceless.  Don’t get me wrong, the Internet download speeds is very fast, but that is where the good qualities end.  The Internet is prone to constant crashing, and the T.V. is prone to constant freezing.  The weird thing is that neither or at the same time.  The boxes usually store a long enough cache of what is happening to get by with the Internet crashes, but the boxes just freeze.  Randomly and when we haven’t had an Internet down time in several hours.  I called them and asked them (Them being the AT&T U-Verse team) weather or not this was the box re caching what is happening.  They said no, the box re-caches on restart, and that it doesn’t even need the cache to run right, just as kind of an “anti-skip” like iPods have.

So I call them again.  They tell me now that there has been a red light on one of our boxes for several weeks, and that we were never contacted because they thought the red light was a false alarm (thanks AT&T for making sure).  They ask me if it is doing it on the rest of the T.V.s, which it is, and tell me that it must be some different problem, cause it would only happen on that one box.

What is the verdict?  Turns out that it was not A  box, my Internet, or anything like that, but all of them.  They said that Microsoft IPTV software (based on my least favorite thing, windows) is just kinda buggy, and will hopefully get fixed with updates down the road.

I’m sure there is a technical explanation to the boxes not working, other then a Mac user trying to give the panacea answer; Microsoft.  But in all actuality, not even the U-Verse team wanted to go further into the issue.