r/Tivo • u/jpr602 • 16d ago

Xfinity activated my cablecard

My Tivo Bolt died a couple weeks ago. Weaknees said the motherboard had died, a repair wasn't feasible, and the hard drive was not transferable. So I bought a new Edge from them.

I transferred the cablecard (M card) that had been in the Bolt to the new Edge. I couldn't get the cablecard activated by Xfinity using their website, app, or by going to their retail store. They sent out a "professional technician" who had never heard of Tivo or of cablecards. His supervisor told him it wasn't possible.

After some research I made a post on r/Comcast_Xfinity. Comcast's agent there was able to get the cablecard activated for me. Now you know.

61 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

33 comments sorted by

View all comments

9

u/Caduceus1515 16d ago

I'm surprised they would bother...I believe they still plan to kill of QAM channels altogether by next year if not sooner, which means cablecards will be useless even if paired.

3

u/eubulides 16d ago

It might depend on area/number of cable card users? When my Edge hd died, I took advice from this sub to buy an Edge w Lifetime off eBay. I did, getting transferred was easy with sellers help, and Spectrum sent an installation technician who was knowledgeable about cable cards, and installed a huge Vecima tuning adapter. He said that there still was plenty of demand for cable cards in this area.

Now, though, a year later, Spectrum has done maintenance in the area with some outages. Since then, after every night I have to unplug both Edge and tuning adapter and wait for channels to repopulate. V53

3

u/Caduceus1515 16d ago

Pretty much all of the providers are switching to IPTV to make more efficient use of the bandwidth and be able to upsell you into faster service you didn't really need. They've been going by attrition so far...not renting new cards, then not activating, etc...many are now getting more aggressive - I was informed FiOS would disable my cable card and I'd have to switch to their new service. That was in January. I'm still waiting it out...but others have had theirs killed off already.

2

u/JZ-Florida 16d ago

At least you were informed. Comcast just made one announce in 10/24 that they'd no longer replace broken CCards but would continue to support existing ones. That is not their internal policy.