FIOS giveth and taketh away

I'm still enjoying the benefits of a generous offer a Verizon FIOS-TV rep made my wife over the phone a while back: We give you the movie package free. "Uh, sure," we said, "as long as it's free."

Indeed, we have more movie channels than we can handle, and indeed, they are "free," or at least not showing up as additional charges on top of our already ample bill.

However, though the FIOS folks giveth, yea, they also taketh away. It took me about 6 to 8 weeks to notice, which shows how little impact this "taketh away" had, but still, it's disappointing to discover that the nature of our package has changed. The difference is subtle, but it looks like the net result is the loss of a few channels we had before we got those free movie channels.

I rarely watched Hallmark Movie Channel, and the fact that it chopped up even the few interesting films it ran made it an inessential part of our lineup. MGM-HD is a much more interesting network, but since it is ONLY in high-def, it isn't as much use to me and my glorious low-def setup, and one two-hour film on that outlet takes up about 15% of my DVR space. As a result, time-shifter that I am, I rarely watched anything on MGM-HD, anyway.

But I don't like to lose stuff, dagnab it! It's no wonder they gave us the free stuff. They wanted to switch us into out of their old package to their current "them-friendly" package, whatever that is. This has happened before, sometimes even to our benefit. Actually, all things considered, the 3 months of extra channels has been worth the loss of two rarely seen ones. But I don't like to lose stuff!