Why does premium cable suck now?

[Skaboi]

My area recently recieved digital cable ( iliveinthemiddleofnowhere).  It shows that you can watch any movie being played that month at ANY TIME.  My wife and I are getting ready to move into a new place, and I'm so going to get it!

[raj]

I've got digital cable, and it sucks  the same as regular cable.  There are more chices sure, but most hollywood movies I don't want to see, plus I now have about 4 or 5 shopping channels.  I don't need any more useless crap, and if I were going to buy jewelry, I sure as hell wouldn't buy it off a tv screen.  And what's more, now I can't record one show while watching another. (the feed goes from digital converter to vcr, so whatever signal is going from DC gets recorded & shows up on the screen. grrr.)

Still, I'm not dealing with Time-Warner anymore.  Plus I get Discovery Wings & the Science Channel, plus I ordered the full season of baseball.

[JohnL]

>When did AMC start putting commercials in during movies?

A while back. And of course, all the movies are thoughtfully censored for you.

>I keep wondering why HBO doesn't play older movies

They do occasionally. In fact, when they show older movies, they usually play them more times in a month than they do newer, but obscure movies. For example, it's not unusual to find some thriller you've never heard of before scheduled for maybe 3 days at like 2-4am, but yet Blue Thunder will be on like 15 times over the course of the next three months.

>I loathe commercials, and I expect these movie stations will start putting them in

I don't know about that, but any day now, I keep expecting to see ads for products down in the corner of the screen after commercials, like they do now with ads for other shows on the same network.

>I've got digital cable, and it sucks the same as regular cable

Our cable company just introduced a digital service and I figure it's only a matter of time before they force everyone to switch. They can't even keep the service they have now operating smoothly and they're going to go to a service where a glitch will cause the picture to freeze and break up into little colored blocks. Oh yeah, I'm looking forward to that...