I've been through two upgrades to Contour this week, neighbor and my own.
The good:
- the reformatted Guide is much easier to read
- record and playback are pretty intuitive
- voice command works really well. It's the reason we upgraded, so I don't have to watch the housemate endlessly channel flipping looking for a sporting event.
The bad:
- The old box allowed me to block channels in the guide. Once blocked, they just didn't even show up. With Contour - no way. I was told to turn on Parental Controls and use its channel block feature. This is incredibly stupid it only blocks you from tuning to that channel without a password. Everything still shows up in the very long Guide. There are some shows I just don't want to even know about. (Take a hint Cable companies - we don't want to see all 300 of your channels all of the time. Roku, AppleTV, Fire don't make us do that)
- Housemate and I use TV in our office. The desks are fairly far apart, so we always had two remotes. Not with Contour. I was told a second remote setup with one receiver would be $75 and a $50 service call to program it.
- I don't need the voice command feature, so decided to setup a Harmony One as the second remote. No way! The Contour equipment is not in Logitech's database and I was not able to program anything but the power button by using the Harmony "learn". So we will be playing toss the remote.
- Closed Captioning has been buried even deeper than it was before. Before we had on screen Guides, you could toggle Closed Captioning with a button on the remote. Then we got the Guide and CC got buried in 3 or 4 levels of menu. We can't be the only people out here who like to turn on CC. Hearing impaired people probably couldn't find it. (Take a hint Cable companies - CC on my Roku 4 consists of one click on an asterisk button.)
Cox is still WAY better than any alternatives here, but this Contour upgrade was a complete wash for me. Save your money and buy a new Roku.
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