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WTH Xfinity no longer lets users turn off their cable box

2 points by ricberw ↗ HN
I thought I was going insane -- anyone have a worse UX change that a company implemented this week?

"Why can't I turn off my X1 TV Box with my remote control power button? This feature was disabled to address issues that our customers had with keeping their TV and TV Box power synchronized. Because the remote communicates with the TV and TV Box using different signaling technologies, one device would sometimes get turned off while the other was turned on. We do realize that disabling the Off button on the remote control isn't ideal, and we are looking into options to address this issue. In the meantime, you can turn the TV Box off by saying "power down" into your Voice Remote."

https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/x1-power-save-faqs

5 comments

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pwg
> This feature was disabled to address issues that our customers had with keeping their TV and TV Box power synchronized.

You'd likely be surprised if you were a fly on the wall at their customer service center listening in on calls for help from customers. This one likely ranks near the top of their call list, and for those customers who call with this complaint, it is also very likely extremely hard to talk them through correcting the issue over the phone.

My mother used to get caught by exactly this with her tv and cable box, except instead of calling Verizon she would call me, and there was no way to talk her through fixing it over the phone, I had to go by every time to reset one of the two (TV or Cable box) to be the same state (off or on) as the other one.

I also tried to get her to use two remotes (the CATV one to turn on/off the CATV box, the actual TV remote to turn on/off the TV). She was addicted to "pushing just one button" and didn't want the confusion of "two remotes". So I could not get her to simply do that.

And every time it happened, she had zero understanding of what was wrong or why it was wrong. All she saw was "this TV won't turn on again".

Multiply that by thousands of customers in a given area, and from their viewpoint, simply keeping the cable box on, even when the remote 'off' button is pressed, cuts out a huge number of very difficult to handle calls.

ricberw
Makes sense for her (and potentially for the company as an immediate fix), but the environmental impact here is pretty significant too.

Given this change will now keep cable boxes on by default for all users, we're now burning 19.6kWh (their stat) per box, per year, and there are ~16 million customers (ignoring that most customers have more than one box), so they just increased wasted power by at least ~80% of that (yes, they have a power saver mode, but you have to opt-in to it, and I'll bet <5% of users do that).

... so somewhere in the neighborhood of 19.6kWh * 16 million boxes * 80% unused time per day * 95% of users who don't opt-in = 238,336,000kWh (238.3GWh)

pwg
Agree to all. I wasn't commenting on the global impact. From "the cable companies" viewpoint, they are not paying for that energy (each subscriber is paying individually). And they cared more about reducing their "help desk effort" than about the global environmental impact of their change (i.e., they ignored that which did not directly impact them).
minimaxir
Xfinity never allowed users to turn off the box; it always went into sleep.
31337Logic
Well, they can't spy on your network and track your usage habits with the box OFF now, can they? :-/

Another fun fact: those modems broadcast HIDDEN 5 GHz ssids even if you've "disabled" wifi... and even if you put the modem in bridge mode!

Try it out for yourself!