UCI Housing Network and Cable TV Issues

According to this link, Resnet has added ESPN, Speed TV (Part of ESPN/ABC), Fuel TV (part of Fox) and some other channels to their lineup.
It may be that CampusTelevideo drastically reduced the prices they charge for these channels. When I was a member of the "Cable TV Channel Lineup group" back in 2005, Resnet (i.e., Kevin Ansel and Ted Roberge) told us it would cost $4 per month and person to get ESPN (see here.)
Or maybe they pay this from the last rent increase...

It is rather hard to believe that all of a sudden they managed to provide ESPN "out of the goodness of their hearts"...
I know that Resnet reads my blog, so they may be able solve the mystery. Although I believe that after Mr. Roberge's ill-advised and ridiculous attempt to bully and silence me, he probably doesn't want to talk with me ever again
He has a new boss, though, so maybe this is a sign of good things to come? If so, they can show by providing an opt-out for CCA...

News outlets all over the place (e.g., here) report that the FCC has banned Cable TV lock-ins such as the one at UCI, where Resnet has contracted with one of the worst providers, Campus Televideo, which prevents residents from getting decent, popular channels like ESPN.
This ban on exclusive contracts by the FCC should force Resnet to allow other cable providers in on-campus housing.

This blog actually was started because I was forced, against previous assurances, to cancel my existing Cox cable service and go with Campus Televideo, which is pretty much just the most basic cable service, without ESPN, which doesn't provide premium channels (except HBO for an outrageous price), and doesn't provide digital channels. So, if Resnet had allowed me to keep my previous cable service, they probably could have avoided all the negative exposure they had through this blog.
But well, Mr. Ansel, who pushed the Campus Televideo deal, wasn't interested in listening to lowly graduate students... What else to expect from somebody who lied to my face...
Anyway, they now have to listen to the FCC ;-)

It seems that the switch to DirecTV was a good one. I didn't notice a single outage over the Thanksgiving weekend. That is the longest time without outage since UCI started managing this.
Of course, before, with my subscription to Cox, it wouldn't even have occurred to me to be thankful for a couple of days of working cable... I would have expected nothing less...

Although the situation has improved, it is far from what was standard with Cox.
My current beef is that the audio is not normalized. When channel-surfing, I constantly have to adjust the audio. On some channels the audio level is so low that I have to turn up the volume to hear anything. On other channels, the audio level is much higher, so when I switch channels I nearly have my ears fall off, in particular if I was listening to one of the channels with a low level before.
Professional cable providers (i.e. Cox, etc.) do audio normalization to avoid this problem. Given how long it took them to change providers, I wonder how many months it will take UCI Housing to fix this problem...

Ok, UCI Cable TV is now using DirecTV...
Let's just hope that the channel freezes are a thing of the past.
The channel lineup is here.

Some impressions so far:

• Still no ESPN, but at least Spike TV and FX, and HBO hopefully coming soon.
• The pretty much useless UCTV and Research channels are gone. That's a good thing. I don't know who had the glorious idea to put these programs up in the first place...
  I am sure the people who produce these programs are sincere, but TV is the wrong venue for them. TV is entertainment, for heaven's sake.
• Audio normalization is still not done. When channel-surfing, the audio always has to be adjusted.
• The channel lineup lists 2 UCI channels, but they don't seem to be there. My suspicion is that they are going to be similar to the UCTV channel. If so, they should rather put some real channels there.

I hope that after this fiasco with Dish the UCI housing administration is more open to student participation. Without a number of students putting pressure on the administration, we would still be stuck with the crappy Dish service.

I just received this email:

Greetings,

We received information from the Housing technology office this morning regarding changes in the residential television services:

The cutover to DirecTV will happen on Tuesday November 23. There will be some down time while this is taking place.

Also, we have been receiving several questions about the channel lineup changing. For the most part the residents seem to like most of the new channels. One comment that I keep receiving is that the Phoenix channel is not being offered by DirecTV. The Phoenix channel is a Chinese language
channel. We are however providing KSCI, a multi-cultural channel whose focus is Chinese programming. It will be located on channel 64. Here is their web site for more information. www.kscitv.com

For information on the new channel lineup, please visit the housing website at www.housing.uci.edu/hit/cabletv/channel_lineup.asp

University California of Irvine
Director, Information Technology - Student Housing