My entitled retired Boomer white guy problem of the moment is that I have recorded a lot of Turner Classic Movies since it went HD on FiOS TV last September, and not all of them deserve firing up the video projector. Wanting to save hours on the very expensive projector lamp, that lasts “up to” 2000 hours, for movies that are worthy of the “cinema experience,” I’ve been looking for a way to watch the DVR on the porch TV.
One option would be to go back to what I originally had on the porch, a FiOS set top box with a tuner that can control the DVR over the MoCA coax network. When TCM was in SD, the monthly fees for multi-room media and STB rental weren’t worth the extra cost.
Seven years ago I replaced the STB with a 4-tuner TiVO Roamio OTA DVR with a directional outdoor antenna. That setup continues to work well, with occasional picture breakup, especially on UHF signals, depending on the wind and weather. Once the Watch TCM app became a reliable platform for streaming I was happy, but now that old cable DVR is filling up.
Quite a few of the now-discontinued FiOS STB units are available on eBay for next to nothing. I bought one for $35, delivered, and hooked it up. Following that was a very interesting conversation with a woman in customer support at Verizon.
She saw the box immediately, and her screen showed the serial number had been registered to someone in Baltimore, but it had never been activated, and the customer had never returned it. I asked about assigning the box to my account for activation, and the answer to that question was, “it’s complicated.”
I was told that Verizon has absolutely no interest in the box as an asset. If it had been returned they would have either reassigned it to another customer, or thrown it away, depending on whether or not the model was discontinued by then. “They don’t even bother with remotes,” she said. The upshot was, my box was considered to be stolen property, because it hadn’t been returned to Verizon.
The “stolen property” issue was only one of the problems, with the other being the box is a discontinued product. If I want a STB for multi-room media, the only way to get one would be to scrap my existing setup. What Verizon’s business office wants the customer support reps to do is get customers like me to agree to a new plan, swapping out not only the TV hardware for the current models, but the Internet router as well.
The new plan that would cost at least $50/month more, and in the process I would lose all of the movies on the DVR, and I may as well say bye-bye to my pesky old landline. As a bonus, the WiFi extender, that is working so well, definitely won’t be compatible. They have a new one I can buy. I’ll have gigabit/second Internet speed, but that isn’t a big selling point for me, because 100 Mbps is plenty. I told her I’m not gonna change, not for a while anyway, and for emphasis I pulled out the old, “I’m a retired person” sob story.
So what about my original idea of activating the illegal, discontinued box under my existing plan? I know it’s compatible with the DVR. “I see you have been a customer since 2006,” and there was a sincere effort at rewarding my loyalty. She was nice to attempt registration, but she was locked out of the option, and her supervisor tried an override without success.
A last-ditch suggestion was that technical support has the ability to register and activate discontinued products as part of a troubleshooting process. They aren’t supposed to do that to reassign stolen gear, but maybe if I contact them directly, I might reach someone willing to do it. If successful, I would be charged the monthly multi-room media fee, along with the hardware rental.
Not wanting to bother pushing on this string any more, I am looking into trying another option. This post is getting long, so I’ll explain it in the next one.