![]() Top Gun: Maverick Available on: Amazon, DirecTV, Fios/Verizon, Google Play, Spectrum You can also check out our guides to the best movies on Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO, Hulu, YouTube, and at Redbox. The selections are up to date, but cable providers change their film on demand offerings regularly. Many of the cable companies have branded their Movies on Demand service, so Time-Warner and Charter customers will be looking for Spectrum, Comcast on-demand is branded Xfinity, Verizon goes by Fios and AT&T calls its program U-verse. That’s just the way of the distribution world. Funnily enough, many of our picks for the top of that yearly list are streaming service exclusives, so don’t be surprised to find some older (yet still incredible) films still lingering. Several of these films appear on our list of the Best Movies of 2022. We limited it to new VOD movies available to rent for less than $10. We searched through the offerings of all of the above to bring you the Best Movies On Demand, though no one service offers them all. To submit a tech question, e-mail Rob at Follow him on Twitter at /robpegoraro.The competition for on-demand movies has grown in recent years beyond cable companies like Time-Warner, Charter, Cox Fios and Xfinity to online video-on-demand companies like FandangoNow and internet giants Amazon, Apple and Google. Rob Pegoraro is a tech writer based out of Washington, D.C. ( Disclosure: I also write for Yahoo Finance, and Verizon is buying that site’s parent firm Yahoo in a $4.8 billion deal.) Press the Menu button on the remote, scroll up to Settings, select System, scroll down to Television, and scroll down to select “Auto tune to HD.” Spokesman Raymond McConville said the company hasn’t made this the default because earlier changes to the Fios TV interface were “met with a lot of confusion from customers.” Verizon’s Fios TV boxes have an auto-tune option unmentioned in its online documentation or hardware manuals-I only saw it in a post on its tech-support forum.Time Warner Cable’s boxes also show HD editions of channels by default.This subsidiary of the European cable firm Altice has gotten this right for years: When I looked at this issue in 2012, the company then known as Cablevision was the only firm among those I eyeballed to offer an HD auto-tune option. Optimum’s boxes automatically display high-definition versions of channels.Its older boxes have an option to show only HD channels. Dish Network’s Hopper digital video recorders automatically hide SD channels when HD counterparts are available.Cox’s boxes include an “Auto-tune to HD” option - but its Contour boxes based on Comcast’s X1 software do not.Older boxes don’t do that but should present a “Watch in HD” button if you tune in an SD version of a channel. Its X1 boxes - the Philadelphia firm says half of subscriber households should have them by the end of this year - automatically selects HD versions of channels when available. A similar situation exists at Comcast, the nation’s largest cable firm.But if you’re in one of the small minority of Charter households with an older box, you may have to cobble together a favorite-channels list instead. Charter, the cable company that recently acquired Time Warner Cable and Bright House in a $79 billion transaction, has an “ HD Auto Tune” option on its Spectrum boxes that automatically switches you to the HD version of a channel if you select its SD offering.The DirecTV satellite service that AT&T bought last year is smarter, offering an option in its Settings screen to “Hide SD duplicates” from the program guide. You can’t set the guide to show only HD channels either, although spokesman Brett LeVecchio offered one tip: Channels between 10 should usually be HD. ![]() ![]() At AT&T’s U-verse you can only avoid SD duplicates by using your remote to create a list of favorite channels.You can often fix that with some clicking around settings screens, but your odds vary depending on your TV provider and the age of the box you pay $5 or more a month to rent. SD televisions vanished from retail years ago - the Consumer Technology Association last bothered counting their shipments in 2007 - and it should be an exceedingly safe bet that when subscribers tune into channels available in HD, they’ll watch it on HDTVs. The black bars that bracket a standard-def channel on a high-def screen should be a badge of shame in the subscription-TV industry, but they’re a common sight when you punch in a channel’s traditional number on a cable or satellite remote. My TV box shows standard-definition versions of channels, not the high-definition copies I’m paying for. ![]()
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