Just venting how much I hate the Canadian television guide formats.
Why oh why cant they organise their EPG like Sky in Europe.

I have Rogers as my cable provider and their guide drives me crazy.

The channels are not split into categories like port/Entertainment/Documentary so you have to scroll the full list to find programmes.

Even more frustrating is the channel names are abbreviated so I never know what I'm watching. If I do find something that peaks my interest it's never in HD, then I have to trawl the full list to find the HD version of that channel.

Also whats with listing Adult Channels (We don't subscribe) right before the Sports.

I only want HD channels, but they dont make it easy to only view them.

And there's no festive Christmas jingle or Beehive Bedlam!!!!

I think Rogers might be the worst but Shaw is almost identical and Bell is no where near Sky either.

I don't understand how the interface is so poor, surely it would give one of the companies the competitive edge.

We used to have Shaw. Its menu allowed one to see the guide by category. Just sport, just movies, whatever. And even with the full guide displayed the category was easily identifiable because of the colour. A bit like this. (started as Starchoice but Shaw took over...I picked this image because others were too big)


We have Bell Aliant fibreoptic now. I don't watch it enough to know what features the guide has, other than it lists only the channels included, which I like.

Telus is pretty similar to Sky in terms of having channels in categories and it won't show you channels that you are not subscribed to, IIRC.

Coming from sky+ to shaw was a bit of an eye opener. Even now they haven't caught up to where sky was in 2007. Amazing really.

On the plus side, channel bundling is going to end next year and we'll be able to choose what channels we like and just pay for those.

ITV player online has just put out a beta version with no categories, one has to scour through the whole program listing as well as programs that are not available.

First world problems

The GUI on these boxes is horrible. I've recently had the misfortune of using my girlfriend's Rogers box thing, it's some CISCO device ,and the interface is extremely slow and clunky.

I'm guessing they're just using the base software on the device, maybe editing it to show their own logo. But come on, how hard can it be to make one that has a decent looking and more importantly feature full interface.

I do recall a recent mention somewhere that there may be a restriction being lifted or lessened in regards to allowing non cable provided STB;s to be used with cable networks, thus third parties, say for example TIVO like devices, could be used instead of the cable companies pile of poop.

So Rogers finally did an update of their software. Unfortunately it did not address any issues such as organising Channels into categories or Displaying full channel names.

It looks a little cleaner and modern but the changes seem pretty superficial.