Thin-Air ATSC: Once Again, Microsoft's Stumble-Guilty

The U.S. analog-to-digital terrestrial television transition, a subject to which I’ve devoted numerous blog posts and two feature articles in recent times, finally happened last Friday. By most accounts, it went surprisingly smooth…with the exception of owners of Microsoft Windows Media Center Edition-based computers. Wait, wasn’t I just writing about this issue three months ago? Why yes, I was. But as I tweeted last Friday evening, and as others subsequently also discovered, MCE’s Program Guide once again went AWOL on June 12. And three days later, in spite of alerts posted by yours truly and others, along with repeated ‘it’s fixed’ promises from Microsoft, it’s still AWOL.

Here’s a screenshot of a portion of my Media Center system’s Program Guide, captured five minutes prior to writing these words, and subsequent to the latest in a litany of both manual guide updates and more fundamental location reconfiguration attempts over the past three days:

Notice how all of the sub-channels for each station have the same listings? That’s not supposed to happen. Now let’s take a look at the remainder of my Program Guide:

ABC affiliate KOLO, after having shut down its NTSC transmission in early January, migrated its digital signal from VHF channel 9 to 8 on Friday. And as was the case three months ago, the result was a perpetual ‘no data available’ MCE notification. Fortunately, I alternatively had access to KOLO’s programming schedule via the station’s website, so I was able to set up a manual recording that still netted (pun intended) me a copy of the definitive Game 5 of the NBA Finals.

Three months ago, I was told that Microsoft had put in place a long-term fix for its MCE Program Guide problems, and that the glitch absolutely positively wouldn’t recur on June 12. That promise was clearly amiss. I can’t believe that the company repeated its earlier mistake, and I really can’t believe that three days later, the system’s still broken.

Followup: Microsoft responds (bolded emphasis is mine):

Despite dedicated efforts to prepare for the digital transition, which included extensive rehearsals and testing, some Windows Media Center users receiving ATSC signals still experienced an issue relating to some of the updated channel frequencies not being processed through the new guide data feed over the weekend.

The data feed with the updated frequencies has finished processing and was made available for all clients to download early Monday. This does not require any installation on the user’s part and will be delivered automatically, though it may take up to 24 hours to appear depending on location. We will continue to monitor the situation, and apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Nice to know. But it’s Tuesday evening. And my Program Guide is still messed up.