Well I guess we all have different ideas of what 'freezing' is.
If i watch Travel channel, it stalls for about 6 seconds and it does this twice a minute - this is annoying and spoils the viewing.
If I watch any of the channels mentioned here for 5 minutes each and none of them do this, I'd say they were stable...how long am I supposed to check for? - 10 mins? - 20 mins?
I think we can all manage with a short glitch a few times an hour on any channel
This is the problem, a 5 minute snapshot is fine if the problem is constant but at the moment it appears the channels can be fine for a time and then seem to freeze numerous times in a short while. For example I had one of the discovery channels on the other day for couple of hours and it didn't freeze so I turned it off, I went back to it later in the day and it was unwatchable.
I'm not so sad that I sit constantly checking but if I am in the room doing something else I will stick it on so I am checking throughout the day/evening and it varies drastically and it's not always bad at the same time of day which you may expect if its a server issue. After watching it for 2 hours I could say, nope there is no problem, but I didn't as I wanted to check a few times before saying anything.
This is the way I see it:
1. If it was a provider (even with a number of different resellers) it would be affecting all of their customers, it doesn't appear to be or we would see a lot more users of that provider complaining. I've sold hundreds of cable boxes and generally if there is an issue I hear about it, I am hearing about it (hence why I am checking) but only from a small percentage of them and not all using the same provider.
2. If it was users connections etc then you would see someone saying 'I had this issue and fixed it by ....', but we're not
3. it appears to be affecting users with different providers which would suggest it's more than a '0h it's your provider' issue.
4. It could well be worse on the lesser used channels which is not uncommon but it definitely does seem worse this past week on them, and even main channels are slightly affected, I watched the spurs game the other night on sports channel and it glitched just twice the whole game, more than it has in the past but not enough to concern me.
So in answer to you're question, 'how long am I supposed to check for?' the answer is 'how long is a piece of string?' LOL, you could turn a channel on now and watch it perfectly for an hour or so, you could turn it on for 5 minutes at another time and see it is totally unwatchable.