Hey, what happened to my show?

For those of you who are customers of Cox Advanced TV (formerly Cox Digital Cable) take note: The daily, and sometimes more than once-daily, rebooting of your cable box is a problem that's Cox Communications is addressing. It happened at my home at 9:14 p.m. Wednesday, while I was in the middle of watching the ABC sitcom “Modern Family.” The screen went blank, then a sequence of messages announcing the system reboot began to appear. The programming returned, but not at the point it was interrupted. Instead, the channel returned at the start of a commercial break.

I guess this is another reason to use the digital video recorder feature I'm paying for, but the same thing would have happened. There would have been a couple of minutes of blankness in the middle of the show.

The daily reboots have been happening on my home system for about three weeks. Other Cox customers tell me the same thing has happened to them. They all ask me: "When's it going to end?"

I asked Juergen Barbusca, communications manager for the Cox Las Vegas office, this question. He replied:

"Like you, I've been experiencing this spontaneous rebooting of my home digital box. Others are having the same issue. The root cause can be traced back to the software that created the new enhanced user guide we rolled out in mid-May. The software was created and is managed by a third-party vendor, and (this vendor has) all hands on deck poring over thousands of logs in an effort to determine and fix the rebooting issue (each time a box reboots it sends a log to the controller). Engineers on our end are also working on this.

“You will understand this better than most folks when I mention that technology has a large boon-and-bane factor: the greater convenience or enhancement can be coupled with some difficulty or challenge. That's what we're facing right now with the rebooting issue.”

So, there you have it. The folks at Cox watch TV, too. They don't like what's happening and are working with their providers to fix the problem. In the meantime, learn how to dive into the “on demand” features included with Cox Advanced TV. You'll like what you find and you can replay any parts of programs that are lost when the system reboots itself.