Another week, another round of FiOS TV announcements with Washington in the mix. This past week, Mountlake Terrace, Mukilteo and Redmond voted to approve video franchises for the carrier, as did the villages of New Hempstead, Hempstead and Kenmore, New York. Finally, we're told that select residents of Ashland, Massachusetts can finally place their orders for FiOS TV after hearing that it was coming in June. We'll see you next week -- here's to hoping your neck of the woods gets covered within the next seven days.

Read - Washington expansion
Read - New York expansion
Read - Massachusetts expansion

It has been a pretty quiet week for Verizon on the FiOS TV front, and while a slew of new places were treated to FiOS high-speed internet, just a few locales picked up notices of incoming TV service. Nevertheless, Snohomish County, Washington granted the provider a video franchise, as did the village of Fishkill, New York. Glocester and Smithfield, Rhode Island residents, on the other hand, can place their orders right now should their home be within the service area. We'll see you next week -- here's to hoping your neck of the woods gets covered within the next seven days.

Read - Washington expansion
Read - New York expansion
Read - Rhode Island expansion

Maybe you haven't noticed, but Verizon has been throwing FiOS TV to Washington cities on a really regular basis. This week, we see Woodway awarding the carrier with a video franchise, while nine more New Jersey cities -- including parts of Salem County, the city of Camden and the city of Paterson -- get the luxury of ordering. Finally, we've got much of Stafford County, Virginia expecting to receive the fiber-based programming service in the future, though Verizon only promises that rollouts will begin "later this summer," with the rest of the place having to wait anywhere between a few months and a few years to get covered. We'll see you next week -- here's to hoping your neck of the woods gets covered within the next seven days.

Read - Virginia expansion
Read - New Jersey expansion
Read - Washington expansion

Though probably not as niche as Rural Free Delivery (RFD HD), World Fishing Network HD still has a pretty narrow audience. That being the case, there's still some logic to pushing the channel in rural parts of America or in regions with nearby fishing outlets. Call us crazy, but New York City is not the first place that comes to find when someone mentions deep sea fishin'. Nevertheless, Verizon has just announced that WFN HD has arrived in the Big Apple on FiOS TV, giving transplants an easy way to get back in touch with their small town roots. There's no word on when the station will hit other FiOS TV areas, but we'd bet it'll be making the rounds soon enough.

For the second week in a row now, we've got quite a few locales getting blanketed (or at least getting set for coverage) by FiOS TV. Verizon has announced that its fiber-based television / high-speed internet services are now available in Covina, West Covina and Sepulveda, California. Furthermore, Washington state is getting even more FiOS TV love by awarding the carrier a video franchise in Woodinville. We wrap this week up with confirmation that said service is finally headed to Newburgh, New York after initially hearing that a deal was in the works last December. We'll see you next week -- here's to hoping your neck of the woods gets covered within the next seven days.

Read - California expansion
Read - Washington expansion
Read - New York expansion

Verizon's latest push to get you to switch from your current carrier revolves directly around high-def, as it's offering new customers a HD DVR or HD Home Media DVR for a full year should they sign up before October 4th. According to Shawn Strickland, vice president of video solutions for Verizon, FiOS TV is "delivered over the network that's built for HD," and it's doing its best to ensure that everyone out there knows it. So, do any of you other providers care to match this, or will the leapfrog game end here?

[Image courtesy of PCMag]

Coming off a somewhat busy week last week, it seems that Verizon's worker bees are still out in full force (begrudgingly or otherwise) in order to keep those FiOS TV installations going at a rapid pace. Up first, we're seeing the fiber-based programming service head to even more apartments in Northern Virginia, this time to Archstone Apartments in 14 NoVA communities. Next, we're seeing that yet another locale in Washington state (Brier) has awarded Verizon with a video franchise, while four more Massachusetts towns (Northborough, Stoughton, Stow and Sutton) now have the ability to order FiOS TV. We'll see you next week -- here's to hoping your neck of the woods gets covered within the next seven days.

Read - Virginia expansion
Read - Washington expansion
Read - Massachusetts expansion

Finally, a multi-system operator that see this whole two-way CableCARD problem the same way we do. Don't get us wrong, we want to get rid of our providers STB as much as the next, but the way we see it is tru2way isn't that great, but is better than nothing. Just like Verizon, we'd like to see "a cable-centric approach to interactive connectivity [that] does not inhibit technological innovation... or disadvantage other segments of the video marketplace." Or in other words, having the choice of what hardware that we may use on our provider's network isn't good enough, we want to choose the software too. While the rest of the cable industry thinks tru2way is open, we think it is about as open as AOL Internet access was-- so yeah, it's a walled garden. The other thing that really hit home with us about Verizon's statement, was that it thinks the approved solution should be an "all-provider" solution, meaning it should be the same no matter if the provider uses coax, fiber, copper or satellite to deliver services. We couldn't agree more, and would love nothing more than to be able to use an HD TiVo (for example) on any provider we wanted without being forced to give up any features such as HD or VOD.

For the third week in a row, we've got Verizon's FiOS TV service headed to new parts of Washington. This week, video franchises were approved in both Kenmore and Marysville, while the rest of the action went down on the east coast. Starting at the bottom, we've got Florida's Hidden Creek development in Tampa getting served; moving on up, we see 23,000 households in Rockville, Maryland getting blanketed sometime later this year. Finally, residents of Amityville and Kent, NY can expect FiOS TV soon so long as the approvals slide on by the New York State Public Service Commission. Pretty busy week, huh Verizon? Let's keep it up. We'll see you next week -- here's to hoping your neck of the woods gets covered within the next seven days.

Read - Washington expansion
Read - Florida expansion
Read - Maryland expansion
Read - New York expansion

Despite the fact that DirecTV has somehow managed to wrestle MSG HD away from the grasp of Cablevision (the station's owner), most other carriers aren't having as much luck. A recent post by Verizon's Eric Rabe slams Cablevision for its refusal to cooperate with the Cable Act's program access rules in high-definition, noting that it has resorted to going back to the FCC in an attempt to force things forward. Rabe even calls Verizon out, noting that "it's pretty obvious that Cablevision is trying to circumvent the FCC's program access rules by denying Verizon MSG in HD." We don't doubt that there are two sides (one of which is being hidden here) to this story, but in theory, we have to agree that we wish MSG HD was available for more providers. So yeah, go get 'em Verizon -- just don't get too cocky.

[Thanks, Tim]

Not quite four months after Time Warner Cable completely and entirely revamped the HD lineup in New York / New Jersey, another big player has entered the Big Apple. NYC residents, meet Verizon. After tons of planning, drawn-out meetings and a bazillion approvals, FiOS TV is now available to order in 108 neighborhoods in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island. Better still, the carrier is offering 100 high-definition channels in the area, and if all goes to plan, that number will creep upward even more in the not-too-distant future. Jump on past the break for a (long) list of the communities that can order service today. So, the big question: are any of you NYers making the switch?

Read - Official release
Read - More details

We've known that FiOS TV was headed to the Pacific Northwest (Washington, in particular) for awhile now, and just a week after said state nabbed its first FiOS TV community, along comes Everett claiming seconds. We've also got Portsmouth, Virginia and Northborough, Massachusetts joining the in-crowd, but that's it for the last full week in July. We'll see you next week -- here's to hoping your neck of the woods gets covered within the next seven days.

Read - Northborough, Massachusetts expansion
Read - Portsmouth, Virginia expansion
Read - Everett, Washington expansion

Although Oregon received those shiny new high-def channels a few days back, everyone else (Ft. Wayne notwithstanding) is wondering when exactly they can expect 'em. Verizon has just posted up an official rollout schedule, which has New York getting them today, Northern New Jersey on July 30th and the rest of the gang sometime in August. Let us know if your town gets anything early (or late), won't you?

[Thanks, J]

While Miami sits and waits (and waits...) for FiOS to hobble on down from Tampa, Verizon is taking the time to trumpet its current level of service in the Sunshine State. As of now, just south of 800,000 homes and businesses in six West Central Florida counties can tap into FiOS TV should they so choose. Unfortunately, the provider didn't mention any upcoming expansion plans, so it looks as if that 800,000 figure could remain current for some time to come.

You'd think that if a provider had only added one HD channel in the past year -- and was falling behind its competition in the HD arms race -- that it'd be the first to proudly announce any new additions, but you'd be wrong. FiOS subscribers around the country started reporting on Saturday that USA HD and CNBC HD showed up in the guide as channels 884 and 879, respectively. The rumor is that this is in preparation of all the Olympics coverage in HD on those channels, and this makes sense as in addition, there were also two dedicated Olympics HD channels added to the guide at 896 and 897, which are currently displaying nothing more than color bars now.