How to spoil a movie night in one easy step.
Last night, my wife and I decided to watch a movie using Verizon FiOS TV’s video-on-demand (VOD) feature. About an hour into the movie, the audio started breaking up and the video started pixelating. Then this error message appeared:
“Error
A problem has occurred with your request. Please ensure that the wires are securely connected to your set-top box. If you continue to experience problems please contact Verizon at (888)553-1555 and specify code (CL-14).”
Yes, happy Valentine’s Day to you too, Verizon. My wife had fallen asleep on the sofa, so I put on some soft music and used the opportunity to help Verizon debug their problem. I’m such a nice consumer.
Incidentally, in the old days, area codes were optional for local calls, which is why they were put in parenthesis. Most area codes are no longer optional, and toll-free area codes never were, so let’s all agree never ever to put area codes in parenthesis again. Mmm-kay?
I called Verizon and waited 18 minutes on hold before getting to speak to somebody. While on hold, I did what every TV consumer would do in the same situation. (No, not go to the bathroom.) I went to the basement, restarted the broadband router (being sure to leave it off for about 20 seconds), came back upstairs, restarted the cable box (ditto), and tried to access VOD again. No luck, same error message. One variant of the error message simply referred to “Error 14” and didn’t include a phone number.
Guess what the Verizon representative suggested? Yup, restarting the router and cable box. So we did, same results.
“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
– Albert Einstein
At this point, my romantic Valentine’s Day evening was toast. Maybe the V-Day Blizzard of ’07 had knocked out a Verizon server? Maybe VOD was getting hammered by all the romantic couples in New England? I asked the Verizon rep where he was. California.
I was on the phone with Verizon for 55 minutes and they were not able to solve the problem. We verified that FiOS Internet service worked fine, Verizon TV worked fine, everything worked except VOD. Sounds like a Verizon VOD server issue to me. Or maybe I was just imagining the problem. Could be either.
I had to ask the rep what Verizon was going to do to make this very patient customer whole. (Hint #1: good companies take the initiative to make their customers happy and actually have their own ideas about how to do this. Hint #2: keeping customers on the phone for 55 minutes to debug a 2-hour movie and then offering no compensation isn’t one of those good ideas.) He asked me to call back and check on the trouble ticket. After my prompting, he said that he’d ask his supervisor about giving a week of service credit (whatever that means). I explained that I had invested 55 minutes of my life on this and was not investing any more time. I said that they could email me to close out the matter. The Verizon rep said he had no means to send email to me. (They should try Verizon FiOS Internet service in California.) “Humor me,” I said, “and enter my email address in the file.” He did. I’m not holding my breath.
Verizon is making Apple TV look better every day.
I’ll save anyone thinking of switching to FIOS TV alot of time and/or money… DON’T DO IT. For the time being, quality is better with other carriers, and don’t even get me started with customer service. At least 10 calls to Verizon in the past 4 months to clear up ONE seemingly simple issue.
Greetings,
Here’s some more advice if you are watching VOD: put the remote in a drawer where you can’t reach it. Because the rewind button works, the fast-forward button works, and the pause button works, but the play button does not work. If you make the mistake if hitting pause, fast-forward, or rewind during your VOD feature, then your only option is to start from the beginning of the movie.
Oh Verizon FiOS TV VOD, how I hate thee.
Regards,
Erik
Simon,
Having the same problems with the resets and cutting off the TV and box. I just had FiOS installed on Monday (10-15). I still don’t have one of my phone lines working and am wating for a tech to show up (was suppose to be here between 1 – 5, it’s now 5:25 and I’m on hold with “CS”). I was not happy with Verizon not finishing the installation of my 2nd telephone line on the day the service was connected. When I called them, I’m still wating!!!
CS is not in the language of Verizon FiOS.
Verizon Fios TV is not ready for prime time. It cuts off recorded programs in the middle, does STB software downloads in the middle of the day with no warning, and the remote is very hard to use. Either the remote signal fails to activate the STB (despite the red flashing light) or you hit the wrong key. It has nasty human factor design elements. I cannot understand how a major US corporation that has such a long-term good record of excellent service can offer such junk. And one more thing, in southern California Verizon is providing new customers with recycled STBs. My guess is they were pulled from other unhappy customers.
I have had FiosTV for a number of months now and since having it installed i have noticed some weird behaviour. It will, without notice reset the unit and switch off the televsion. They have changed the box and it still happens. In the end they refunded my account back to the day it was installed. The new box is doing the same thing. I think it is a code problem but is anyone else experiencing this?
I have lots of the same problems posted here. A quicker way to thru to them is to say “agent” after the recoring starts telling you all the Einstein things to do again.
We’ve had FiOS Internet and 3 phone lines switched over to it for over a year. Overall, the service has been incredibly good – much better than cable modem service from Adelphia/ComCast. We’ve only had two problems with the service:
1) The ActionTech router died an ignominious death, and it took two days to get a new one, since they had to ship it out rather than sending a tech to replace it. When the new one was installed, a phone call to tech support had to be made to associate the new router’s MAC address to the ONT. Not that big of an issue, since I was able to connect up an old Linksys router and make it work in the interim.
2) We’ve had a major outdoor landscaping/construction project going on since mid-summer, and one day the backhoe going up and down the driveway yanked down all the lines – power, fiber, copper, and coax. The power company was here within 15 minutes! Verizon showed up 20 minutes after that and fixed the fiber and copper. ComCast took THREE DAYS to come out, since they told me that cable TV was non-essential service. Well, if it is, then FiOS TV is going in asap. Our Township just approved the franchise agreement with Verizon, so it shouldn’t be long before the service is offered.
Notwithstanding the VOD problems that have been mentioned, I’m very curious to see whether the HD service, especially the local channels, are better than what ComCast offers. Watching Sunday Night Football last night, the SD channel looked better than the HD channel! There was so much macro-blocking (the proper MPEG term for pixelation) and quantization noise, it was nearly unwatchable.
Consumers need to understand – what ALL of these companies deliver to you as ‘HD’ is nothing of the sort. Native high-definition programming runs at 1.485 Gbps. Obviously, delivery systems do not yet exist that can accommodate that much bandwidth to your home, so the signals are compressed, using MPEG-2, and, in some cases, MPEG-4 AVC H.264 compression. The majority of signals use MPEG-2, and typical compressed bitrates are between 12-15 Mbps. Yes, that’s right, ~99% of the signal is discarded along the way. If you were to watch native HD and what you get in your home side-by-side, you would be really pissed off.
Start complaining, to anyone you can, about the poor quality of ‘HD’ programming.
Peace.
We recently switched to FISO I TOTALLY agree that customer service is HORRIBLE!
Every since we had it installed on August 20th, we’ve have nothing but problems. They put a Temporary line from the street to our house (see attached pictures). The only problem is that the line runs across the sidewalk and it’s the same place the bus stops every morning. I’ve called Verizon at least 5 times this week and it’s always the same story. They can’t help me because they contract work like this out. I’ve been trying to get this fixed since August 20th and nothing has been done. My neighborhood has many small children and I am afraid that someone is going to trip over the wire! I just want to warn other people so they do not have to deal with what I am dealing with. I spend at least an hour each night on the phone with them and nothing gets done.
Verizon is the worst customer service I have ever dealt with….period. I have logged over 20 hours on the phone trying to get billing issues ironed out and everyone says they will fix it but no one does. Six months and counting still no credit.
Has anyone else seen this behavior? Fast-forward, and for no reason whatsoever, it either resets back to the beginning or to some random point (in this particular case, 15 minutes into the show). It is soooo annoying!!