Tuning Adapters Finally Rolling Out

Posted on Tuesday, January 6, 2009 by MegaZone

Back in October Comcast started rolling out Tuning Adapters, and Time Warner was offering pre-orders, but it looks like it is spreading.

Yesterday Hank, a reader from Spencer, MA, contacted me to let me know that he’d received a notice in the mail from Charter that they will be switching to SDV on February 2, 2008 and that, as a TiVo user, he could claim a free Tuning Adapter on or after January 5th. Spencer is very close to my home in Worcester, MA, where I also have Charter. I haven’t received the notice yet, but it may well be waiting for me when I return from CES next week. I’m kind of hoping it is, I’d like to get some hands-on experience with the Tuning Adapter to see if it works as well as promised.

And today TVBarn.com is reporting that Time Warner has begun deploying Tuning Adapters in Austin, TX.

It is about time, but it is nice to see this finally getting into the hands of TiVo users to allow them to tune SDV content.

About MegaZone

MegaZone is the Editor of Gizmo Lovers and the chief contributor. He's been online since 1989 and active in several generations of 'social media' - mailing lists, USENet groups, web forums, and since 2003, blogging.    MegaZone has a presence on several social platforms: Google+ / Facebook / Twitter / LinkedIn / LiveJournal / Web.    You can also follow Gizmo Lovers on other sites: Blog / Google+ / Facebook / Twitter.
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  • Hank

    Hi- Hank Here with an update–

    Called Charter yesterday, and spoke with a very nice CSR who scheduled my Tuning Adapter install for this Saturday– She was well informed about the switch to SDV..

    As my Tivo HD uses two single stream cable cards, she said I will need 2 tuning adapters… that seems strange to me, but whatever– they are free…

    I’d switch to an M-Card, but the two single stream cards have worked well for over a year, and I don’t want to fix something that is not broken….

    I’ll post again after the install…

  • http://www.gizmolovers.com/ MegaZone

    That sounds bizarre, everything I’ve heard is that it is one Tuning Adapter per host device. And that would be an issue for TiVo owners using WiFi – the TiVo only has two USB ports and the WiFi adapter uses one.

    I’d contact TiVo before the install to get clarification from them.

    Thanks for the update.

  • Hank

    Agreed on the bizarre 2 adapters thing!! Thanks for looking into it!

  • Andrew S

    Just thought I should throw out that I received my Tuning Adapter from Time Warner about 3 weeks ago now. Hooked it up and things weren’t working great right at the bat. But a phone call to them and a day later and things are looking great. BTW – I’m in Rochester, New York

  • David H

    I’ve been though a complete nightmare with my experience in the Northern Virginia are with COX and my Tivo HD. I first picked up a Cisco STA1520 TA box from COX in early Dec 2008 and when connected it would immediately reboot itself about every 20 to 30 minutes, of course stopping anything your trying to record or watching which migth be switched video channels. I called COX and on one understood the technology at all, couldn’t help me, finally a regional service manager emailed me to wait until Jan 09 for a Tivo software update. I did that, not using the TA adapter, and when no update happened from Tivo call Tivo customer support and they knew nothing about an update.

    This is a really long story but COX sent out a senior tech how know almost everything the did about the TA, Tivo and their cabling system. He almost rewired my complete location, all new filters and replace my single stream cablecards with a multistream card, and a new Cisco TA box. That seemed to stop the TA rebooting, but after he left it rebooted about every 3 to 4 hours. COX asked me to get Tivo to swap out my TIVO HD for a new unit. I spent a week asking Tivo to do that, got tired of them asking me to wait for level 2 TIVO support to contact me, they never did so last week I bought a new TIVO HD to make sure this isse was or was not TIVO. After many connections into TIVO to bring my unit up to software release 11 my TA box actually ran 7 hours without a reboot, then started acting up once again. COX sent out an engineer who swapped the multistream cablecard and that seemed to settle the box down again, but once again today the TA box (3rd box I’ve had) is rebooting every hour or so.

    I’m loosing any faith this technology between TIVO, CISCO and COX is anywhere near stability!!