Altice has problems but should be tried.

This post has gotten several comments, pretty much all negative:

Altice One box: more problems. THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 2018

Most of the problems that I have had have gone away. The remote no longer loses pairing with the Altice One box. DVD playback only occasionally gets interrupted and even then usually resumes after I click OK.

The two boxes still turn themselves off after not receiving something from the remote for a while but I now know to look at the power button and if it's red I push it before turning on the TV and that avoids the formerly mysterious blank screen. Still mysterious is why Altice continues to annoy its customers with this policy but apparently it frees up bandwidth, or so I suppose.

Still annoying and probably easily fixed:
- three buttons must be pushed to get the guide on screen
- on screen information about a program is very limited; a movie does not even show the year on the first screen
- if there are multiple pages of info, the way to get to page two is to click the up arrow to get the cursor positioned to then click the right arrow to get to page two
- comparable nonsense for changing the end time when setting up a recording.

This stuff looks like it was designed by people who had heard about TV but had never actually watched TV. So, why try or stick with Altice?

Altice is making a fundamental attempt to do it differently and it's not missing by all that much. It's the first to actually pair a remote to a box. Previously, if you had two TV sets in the same room, changing the channel on one changed it on all. Now that problem has gone away.

The modem and router functions are combined into one small Altice One tuner box. That's been dismissed in some descriptions as something for non-techies. Hey, why should a techie not like it? Why add complexity and confusion? It forces you to have Internet connections near your TV, which encourages and simplifies streaming.

My biggest complaint, even more than the inconvenience of getting to the guide, is the lack of any intelligent fast forward (FF). In fact, the Altice FF is worse than that of regular Cablevision Optimum. Verizon FIOS has FF in 30 and 10 second chunks, plus multi-speed FF. The 30 and 10 seconds of FF makes looking at recorded sports, especially baseball, fairly palatable. You can FF between pitches, which removes much of the dead time.

Give Altice a try. What the heck?