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Jun 13 2012

By: Matthew Tremblay at 06:27 pm

We’ve Got a New, Updated Guide Coming to a Cable Box Near You

Have you noticed a big change to the on-screen Guide on your Time Warner Cable digital cable box?  If not, you soon will.

Time Warner Cable is in the process of launching a new, upgraded Guide on our customers’ digital cable boxes over the next few months.

This new version of Navigator drastically enhances the look and functionality of the on-screen Guide. It’s got improved search and more intuitive navigation features for finding channels and programs by genre, actor and category. One of the coolest new enhancements is the ability to filter the channels that appear in your Guide to just your favorites – no more scrolling through a hundred shopping channels to get to the good stuff!

Here are a few screenshots, first of the favorites-filter, then some others:

As you can see from these images, the Guide features a fresh, clean look with a new color scheme.

  • Go to Settings>Favorite Channels
  • Make your selections – it’s a simple toggle, just press “select” once to favorite something, press it twice to de-favorite it.
  • Then apply the filter and hit the “Guide” button twice, then select the “favorite” filter.

You’ll see only your favorite channels in the Guide from then on.

In addition, some of the user interfaces have been renamed to simplify their functionality, such as the “Access Menu” changing to “Find Channels”, “Find Shows” changing to “Search” and more.

There are also improvements to the TV remote functionality – the “A” button looks up channels by category and the “B” button lets you search by show or movie title. Pressing “SELECT” can be used when watching a channel to see if enhanced features such as Start Over, Look Back or On Demand are available.

If you’ve haven’t received the new Guide yet, newspaper advertisements will be placed just prior it being launched in your area. Customers with an email address listed on their TWC account will also receive an email notifying them when the Guide is coming. Whether your digital cables boxes have the Guide yet or not, you can visit twc.com/Guide to learn more about its changes and increased functionality.

Categories: Carolinas, Content Delivery, Cool Stuff, Digital Cable, New York City, Northeast, On Demand, Product Launches

Comments for this post are closed – all comment threads close after 14 days from the original post date.

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74 Responses to “We’ve Got a New, Updated Guide Coming to a Cable Box Near You”

  1. Looks like the same old guide in new colors. How about an HD/widescreen guide?

  2. The slight changes provide some relief for previous issues with the Navigator software, but in all honesty this Guide has a long way to go to be current and user friendly. Simple tasks with the software are tedious and time consuming. Just to set up my Advanced Search take 9 button presses to set it for Keyword ALL. The Guide Filter was a huge improvement, but doesn’t function like a true Guide Filter. We want to be able to add/remove channels from the guide and scan. The DVR list takes 3-4 steps to sort it every time I want to search and almost all the show names are cut off. It’s still not a 16×9 GUI wasting valuable real estate on the screen.

    On the positive, the interlacing problems seem to be corrected, the Guide as a whole is faster and more responsive and the color scheme is OK.

    All in all, a good first effort to get away from the Navigator debacle and hopefully the improvements will now come quickly & steady. It has a long way to go seeing as how guide software a decade old did what this is just starting to do now.

  3. Glad to see the new colors but you article is misleading in that it fails to state you need to subscribe to Whole-house DVR or Signature Home to get the advanced search capabilities — so you’re,in effect, charging extra for a feature that other cable and satellite companies have provided for years — and which the old Time Warner Passport boxes provided — at no extra cost — 5+ years ago!

  4. TWC is focused on the wrong thing:

    You know, I really wish Time Warner would have ignored the cosmetic stuff and focused instead on getting the cable box manufacturers to fix the horribly buggy DVR’s functional software stack.

    I have had TW DVR’s since they introduced them (something like 10 years now). I think I am on the 3rd or 4th hardware generation now, the Samsung DVR box. They push out software updates and replace one set of buggy code with code with new, different bugs. Clearly there is lack of quality control or lack of caring or both from TWC. I have noticed at least 3 generations of software changes on the current Samsung box in the past 1+ year. Each new release fixes one bug and breaks something that previously worked fine.

    Here’s some examples:

    It used to be if you were watching a recorded show from disk and two recording started up, you would not be interrupted, i.e. that is the desired functionality. Now it changes channel to one of the recordings forcing you to go back into the recorded list and resume play. Why did this used to work fine and now doesn’t?

    Starting 2 updates ago, long delays started appearing when interacting with the box via remote. For instance, commands to change channel went from being handled immediately (always) to randomly occasionally getting delayed and queued up for 10-30 seconds and then getting blasted out all at once as if someone opened the flood gates. For example, the number of up channel presses gets backlogged with no apparent activity for 10-30 seconds then suddenly all the channels change in rapid succession. Of course, with that much delay, the user has already tried reentering the commands which means things get screwed up.

    Then there are bugs with the scheduled recordings list. For some reason after the last software update, TV series I didn’t tell it to record are getting recorded. These shows are not in the scheduled recordings list nor the series manager list yet they get recorded. I suspect either the guide updates are not getting reprocessed when they change schedule or the series manager data from before the software update got corrupted by the update process somehow, but it is clearly broken.

    So here is an announcement about the guide’s color change coming out, and am I supposed to be happy about that when the functionality is still screwed up in multiple ways? It’s like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic and ignoring the glaring hole in the ship. As an enduser of TWC dvr boxes, I am disgusted with the lack of quality in the software and how the quality back tracks instead of steadily moving forward.

  5. Screenshots look like a definite improvement in color selection… but I wholeheartedly second the request for a widescreen guide.

  6. I live in Maine and our DVR’s have never been update even with the old guide in the photos. Our guide looks like it’s from the 90′s. When can Maine anticipate getting some sort of update?

  7. This new update is a mild overhaul of the software. A lot of the changes in the software are under the hood. TWC has hired a new dev team to overhaul the guide and fix the bugs.

    16:9 UI is coming eventually. It will only be for the recent Cisco and Samsung boxes. Those with an older SA box will not get it, due to hw limitations.

    TWC wants to get the guide fixed before adding any new features. This new dev team found the old code to be a mess and it might take a few updates to fix all the bugs.

    Hope this helps.

  8. I understand that the first goals of the new guide where to replace bugs so that speed and reliability issues get fixed, so that’s great! I spoke to customers who love the faster speed and response time, and the software in first markets, Charlotte, North Carolina and Syracuse New York is doing well! Kudos to TWC for that!

    But I totally agree about the crappy keyboard Title ONLY search! Yes, at this time you can ONLY get the Advanced Search filters on the keyboard (All, Title, Cast, Sports) by subscribing to a Whole House or the Signature Home Package. TWC simply MUST have ALL the keyboards on ODN/MDN boxes, search for Keywords. Title Search is USELESS for finding sports, descriptive words, or people. There’s no way around it TWC, until you get keyword search on every one of your boxes that can search for anything typed into the database, the guide will always be mediocre. And it’s sad to say that.

    The other issue is that if you have the Advanced Search, TWC should have the default setting to “ALL” (not title) It takes six button presses (or more) to change the filter to “All.” Set the filter to “All” as a default for a future software update. In addition, change the search function of the keyboard for all the boxes, so that ALL instances of words typed in, are returned in search results. This simply HAS to be done. The sooner, the better. My family and friends have missed shows because they don’t know the Keyboard on almost all the boxes is Title Based Only. Passport had a keyword search option a decade ago, and didn’t even need cloud services! TWC needs to add keyword search to all the boxes ASAP.

  9. I hope the ability to fast forward DVR recordings gets a bug fix, randomly on most recordings it lets me jump forward once and then stops letting me fast forward! Also, when will this be available in the Peidmont/Triad area of NC?

  10. > Paul Muehr: your comments echo my sentiments to perfection, and every bug you’ve mentioned, I, too, am experiencing. The only difference is that I have a Scientific Atlanta 8300HDC, which, apparently, is as bad as your Samsung.

    TWC continues to treat the symptoms & ignore the disease. New software updates add more features, but bog down the outdated hardware. By the time a new STB is made available, it’s already obsolete. A complacent (or overwhelmed) QA staff pushes out bug fixes, without discovering the new bugs they’ve caused. And where does TWC focus its efforts? A new UI.

    Not surprisingly, inconsistency & instability aren’t just limited to their cable TV products; RoadRunner has become equally pitiful.

  11. For crying out loud, how about fixing the cable boxes so they don’t lockup, lose sound, and take 3 minutes to pop up menus? I am tired of swapping out boxes and having “Techs” come to verfiy my signal strength. Get good hardware, then worry about designing and running new software packages.

    I can’t tell you how often I have to unplug my cable boxes to unfreeze them only to then wait 15 minutes for it to reinitialize and work properly for an hour or two.

  12. Any hope that this update will fix the stability issues with the HD DVRs? I have been through several and all of them lock up and/or have pixilation issues on a weekly basis.

    What ever happend to the PassPort OS that the boxes used to run? That seemed very stable and way faster than the Mystro software that they are running now.

  13. Remember Guys,

    TWC wants to first get the bugs out of the software that plagued the old system for six years before adding new features. Once they get the bugs worked out, we should continue to see improvements and new features. This is only a .X release. ODN from 5.1 to 5.2 and MDN 3.1 to 3.2. I am very interested to see how the legacy boxes perform. And I want to give TWC credit for NOT abandoning the MDN platform with this upgrade.

    Satch

  14. Will this guide be coming to L.A. for those of us who have Motorola boxes currently running the iGuide software? I have the Motorola DCH3200.

  15. When I click on the “twc.com/Guide” link, I get redirected to “http://www.timewarnercable.com/texas/learn/cable/guide/” which does not work. Oops. Should not have expected it to work.

  16. We got the new menu system a couple of days ago and hate it. The color scheme is horrible and makes it almost impossible to read the words. The new color scheme is based on their iPad and iPhone app which might explain why it doesn’t play well on a TV; mobile devices and tablets are held a few inches from the eyes but no one sits a few inches in front of their televisions. Also their design team needs to go back to school because anyone that’s ever put together something as simple as a PowerPoint presentation knows not to put a medium blue background together with light grey text.

    This color scheme makes my head hurt. Don’t get me wrong, I can see how this would work well on a mobile device or tablet; it just isn’t translating well to the larger screen in my opinion.

  17. Almost the same as before, a little more user friendly and a touch faster, but still a POS. Plus now I lost my favorites in the channel line-up. Now I get all channels (1-2000). Thanks a lot TWC

  18. Got the new Guide in Wisconsin Last Night. My box is an SA-8300HDC First impressions are as follows:

    Positives:

    *I like the “A” (Find Channels) button for the category lists.

    *Better organization of Listings.

    *Box has a Permanent Guide Filter, which is nice.

    *New color scheme is great! Love it!

    Negatives:

    *Still only have the keyboard as Title Search only. (Unless you subscribe to Signature Home or Multi-Room DVR Services, which gives you advanced search filters. TWC really needs to have the Keyboard search for ALL instances of what is typed in by the user, and set that as the default for ALL boxes. Boxes with Advanced Search, should also default to ALL not title.)

    *The box could be just a little bit faster, but is not intolerable.

    Jack

  19. Just had the new on-screen guide roll out in the Albany / Western Mass area, and it gets two thumbs down from us.
    Response time in cycling through the channel descriptions is awful – easily 2 seconds from the time the ‘up’ or ‘down’ button is pressed until the info at the bottom cycles to show the next channel.
    And typing in a direct-entry channel is no better – a good three seconds to change channel.
    Another “improvement” like this from TWC and I’ll drop them for sure.

  20. I think the new change in colors makes it more difficult to read for older people with failing vision. Also it looks like the new font is smaller? Why doesn’t TWC solicit ideas from all groups prior to changes?

  21. Re: The new Guide Here in Milwaukee Wisconsin,

    After working with it some more, I love the new colors and Category Search functions! Prominent Guide Filtering is fantastic! There is some slowness with the Keyboard. Single searches on the keyboard can take 2-3 seconds from the remote press to when they appear on screen. Multiple listings of sports titles when keyed on the keyboard such as MLB Baseball can take around 20 seconds for my SA-8300HDC box to display the guide data.

    The keyboard gets proportionately slower when there are say 15 or more listings of a show title to display. Note that on my SA-8300HDC box, this is the only major flaw I have observed with the new software.

  22. Instead of the cosmetic color changes, fix the on demand feature!It never works. Also TWC could send out an email notice when it’s doing an auto-reboot. We usually have something recording at the time.

  23. **The black background makes it harder to see the guide. You use to be able to change the color scheme.

    It was really nice before when you could KEY WORD search almost any thing you want and it would show up. You could look up actors, or if you wanted to do A project with fixing a sink. You could just click in sink. etc…

    ** I agree with Paul Muehr :
    I really wish Time Warner would have ignored the cosmetic stuff and focused instead on getting the cable box manufacturers to fix the horribly buggy DVR’s

    ** We have the old Scientific Atlanta and it is just starting to get really buggy. Heard that the newer ones have even more problems. So were very hesitant to get it exchanged.

    The Roku is getting better all the time.

  24. I couldn’t agree more about the color scheme. I can’t believe it tested well on most actual television. Basic layout, typography, and design classes cover that issue. I now hate to use the guide and my roommate who has moderate vision issues has real trouble reading it. Didnt with the old format. I get how it works for other devices, but perhaps a background setting for those and one for sets? Too much to ask from ever increasingly frustrating time warner.

  25. Wow…a color schema/overlay change. Whoopee. How about some real functional improvements?? After beeing away for 2 years and using DirectTV’s boxes, what a disaappointment to return to last decade’s technology with TWC…so many basic issues (widescreen guide anyone?? ability to record a show from a mobile app, but not from a shared digital box??, et. al)

    If it wasn’t substantially cost prohibitive to keep Direct for TV and TWC for cable/VOIP phone necessary for my job, I’d keep Direct for TV. Not that Direct is perfect, but at least the tech is stable and relatively current….

  26. Agree with CJ. Vision challenged folks can’t see the new color scheme. So little contrast. Us boomer aren’t getting any younger & we make up a large piece of the market. fine if ya want to change it, but please give us an option to use a high-contrast version somehow.

  27. the guide is not available to us folks in maine who have the motorola setbox.

  28. I live in Milwaukee area and have noticed that the new Mystro does not play well with the older boxes – I have a SA 8300 HDC. It gets really confused if I am trying to play back a show and record two shows all at the same time. Today I was recording a show at 8PM and playing it back. At 9PM another show was scheduled to start. At the same time I was fast-forwarding and all the sudden all hell broke loose! The SA did not respond to any commands for over 10 minutes! I did recover the show that I started to watch but the other one was toast!

    On Sunday a similar experience. I scheduled two shows to record and even though they showed “recording” in the list at the end of the our only one show was actually recorded. The other one was listed but when I went to watch it there was nothing but a black screen! Had to use the power switch on the box to get back functions.

    I guess this calls for a trip to the TW store to exchange for a new DVR/HDC box. Hope that clears up the issues.

    BTW – I did try the reboot by cycling power after what happened on Sunday.

    Cheers!

  29. Absolutely pointless exercise on the part of TWC. It’s basically painting over a smudge on the wall. Just once I’d like to use StartOver in the morning to watch The Today Show like I should be able to do. Instead I hit the SELECT button and it says “Loading Data” or some other garbage but never gives me the option to start over. I figured the new refresh would fix these bugs but it didn’t. I don’t have time in the morning to call tech support and fix the problem. If FiOS was available in my building I’d have switched on day 1. Slower Internet compared to others, bad boxes – if it wasn’t for the iPad app, they’d be no better than a tin can on my roof.

  30. The new Guide S…Ks…It takes forever for it to navigate thru the channels and if you press down it just skips sereral channels but also takes up to a minute to do so…Terrible trying to see whats on when you can’t navigate!
    Change it back!

  31. I’m not sure when Time Warner will be able to launch the new and improved TV Guide to be put on my HDTV cable box when it hits the tri-state area (Cincinnati to be exact)…..I’d be surprised if many changes are in the works so I think Time Warner should give me an advance notice in my email so I know what’s happening.

  32. Just got this a couple of days ago. Whoop-de-do (sarcasm). Nice colors, but that’s about it. Filtering listings by favorites touted as “coolest new enhancement,” but I had that before just by clicking “favorites” button on remote and I still can only scroll favorites forward, not backward. TWC must really be desparate to say they’re making “big changes.” :)

  33. The new onscreen channel display (telling you current channel) is black (the old one was grey) This black one is harder to read and the sensitivity of the remote has been changed so often channels are overshot or undershot. Someone really blew this upgrade!

  34. AK is right. Lag time between remote control entry and response is looooong–assuming I’ve not been asked to “Please Wait” “Please Wait” “Please Wait” “Please Wait” “Please Wait” “Please Wait” “Please Wait” “Please Wait” “Please Wait”. Usually takes 2 or 3 tries to enter the channel number correctly because of the lag time.

  35. Also curious if anyone at TWC actually reads this stuff and does anything about it!

  36. Hi – I read everything that comes through. Our engineers do read blog comments and take them into consideration during their dev process. I know it can seem to take a long time, as the time between you leaving a comment and something else changing can be lengthy — but please trust that you’re being read here.

  37. I live in New York City (Manhattan) and we just got the upgrade a couple of weeks ago and I hate it because it is very slow when searching for a program or changing a channel. When searching for shows by hitting the “B” button, it takes a real long time before the letters that have been punched in appear on the screen. If you want to select channel numbers manually, say, “702,” it takes forever to get the sequence right because of the slowness. You punch in the numbers and because of the slow reaction time, the channel will change to 7, or 70, or 2. It takes a few tries to get to channel 702.

  38. I live in NYC, too. Gotta say – if TWC’s goal was to get me to watch less TV and find other ways to occupy my time, they’ve done it! As Jamie posted, it’s so slow to respond and so buggy that, much of the time, it’s an exercise in frustration even if I just want to change the channel! Just now, it took 60 full seconds to register that I was changing the channel. Hard to believe that more people aren’t complaining. Anyway, here’s to a summer of more reading, netflix, outdoor fun. I may even drop some of my cable channels because

  39. Search function and channel change performance has been improved in a patch. This patch should be rolling out soon and some divisions already have it.

  40. The font is TOO SMALL!!!!!!! It doesn’t even FILL the screen!!!! How is ANYONE supposed to read it?? Even on my huge tv I can’t see it. Pathetic!

  41. Color scheme not a fan of but much worse and very frustrating is the response time in moving through the channels. It is the worse. I thought it was my remote, and did the changing of the batteries. No difference. I can’t believe more aren’t complaining about this. I thought it would be fixed by now, but sadly it continues to be a pain to use.

  42. We started to have problems with sluggish responses to our remote control immediately after this recent (unwanted) Time Warner software update that downloaded overnight and changed the color scheme of our online channel guide. Personally I don’t care about the guide colors BUT I WANT MY CABLE BOX TO RESPOND TO MY REMOTE CONTROL! It used to channel up or down immediately upon pushing the remote buttons. Now it sometimes responds, sometimes ignores and other times delays responding until I have pushed other buttons and when it finally responds it lags behind by 3 or 4 commands. WHAT IS THE PROBLEM, TIME WARNER? I want to reverse the last software update and go back to the old guide and my old responsive cable box… Can you do that for me? Now my TV not only doesn’t respond frequently to my remote, but it freezes on a channel and I have to reboot the cable box to get it back to its usual sluggish behavior. This is the best you can do? No amount of remote changes, battery changes or rebooting is solving this. This is getting so frustrating that I am ready to change to Verizon FIOS or Direct TV if they PROMISE that their cable box will respond to the remote control. When are you going to fix this?

  43. I live in Queens NY, and I was having terrible problems with Mystro. Like it just deciding to not save any of the recorded shows, or perhaps not recording the shows I programmed at all. I got in the habit of re-booting the box every morning, just to increase the chances that it would properly record in the evening.

    I swapped out the DVR, had same problem. So clearly it was the software. TW cable keeps sending new software to old equipment – I wonder how they know it’s going to work?

    I went out of town for a week, and I had to record my shows on TWO DVRs to be sure I didn’t miss anything. When I came back, the new color scheme was in place.

    I have to admit, the new software is slightly more reliable when it comes to recording what it’s supposed to. It’s only refused to record once, which is still once too often, but at least it’s not happening every night.

    However, there is now a consistent lock-up, or image freeze, every 3 minutes, on both DVRs. For a while it was just on one, and only on the basic channels and not the premiums, but now it’s happening on both DVRs, and even on the premium channels.

    I reported the problem, but after rebooting and refreshing the signals, the freeze-ups are still there, every 2-3 minutes. The cable operator says that a lot of customers are reporting this problem since the recent software change.

    They’re going to send a technician out, but that seems like a waste of both my time and the technician’s, when they know the problem is in the system.

    All I want is a consistent audio + video signal delivered to my TV. Why is that so difficult? And why can’t they make sure that the software works properly before rolling it out system-wide?

  44. This upgrade is dreadful. The guide does not take up the width of the screen, so the font is too small to read.

    The lag time on the remote control for any function is so slow as to be useless and there is no point in searching for a show in the guide, as it takes minutes to load each letter.

    Where did the programmers work previously? At the Knight Capital hedge fund group?

  45. Yes, I have to agree with most of the comments about the sluggishness of the new Navigator software. I especially have trouble in the mornings. The guide just locks up and leaves me with a tiny, small PIP in the upper right-hand corner of my screen for minutes at a time before I have to reboot the box to clear up the sluggishness.

    Although the upgrade has not really given me any new functionality, I will give the benefit of the doubt to the TWC developers in saying that this was a patch to fix many older, legacy bugs on the way to future upgrades to improve the software.

    I recommend to the TWC developers to look at the Tivo software if they want to emulate well done DVR software.

  46. TWC – I just have one thing to say….you better fix all, or at least most, of the issues people are complaining about here before I see a Twitter or Facebook button in the Guide!

  47. I pay $245 a month for TV, Internet & phone!!! That is a huge amount of money to pay for the kind of “bugs” TWC know exist!!! My rates continually increase but the product I receive is inferior!!!!!

    I agree whole heartedky with Paul Muehr. It is as if we live together! I experience the EXACT same issues! Please fix the problems!! The color scheme should be the least of TWC’s worries!!!

  48. I hate the new color scheme! It’s hard to read. If you must change it, can’t you give us a second choice on background color. You have to know that you have many visually challenged viewers out here. Please consider our needs!

  49. I CANNOT READ THE WORDS. My eyes hurt with the new color scheme. Is there a way I can choose to go back to the old color scheme or to the old guide if necessary?

  50. I absolutely can’t stand the new color scheme. Its very dark and it is SO hard to read. Even my 12 year old has a hard time reading it. Is there anyway to bring back the old color scheme?