Time Warner Cable starts rolling out lightly refreshed guide with new color scheme, cloud VOD search

While it's definitely good news that Time Warner Cable is revisiting its Navigator guide again, the bad news is that at least in terms of appearance, very little has changed. The screenshots above show the old guide (left) next to the new one (right) and as you can see, other than a color scheme adjustment to match its new apps, things are almost entirely the same. In terms of functional adjustments, names have changed for some of the menus, and now the A button on the remote pulls up channels listed by category, the B button searches by title and the select button lets you know if features like Start Over, Look Back or VOD are available. According to CED Magazine, the guide's (slight) facelift also goes hand in hand with a new cloud-based video on-demand portal that includes with richer graphics and metadata, as a prelude to more cloud-provided navigation and IPTV set-top boxes. So far we're seeing notes that the new guide is being delivered in Syracuse and Charlotte, if you haven't received it yet Time Warner Cable says it will be running newspaper ads ahead of the change in each area -- people still read newspapers, right?

Update: We're told that another new feature of the update is the ability to filter out any channels you want from the guide. Check one box on the Ben-o-vision form.