The slowness can also be because the channel you are trying to watch is not even there.

I'm not sure who all is using it now but I used to work on the setup for Switched Digital Video. If nobody in your neighborhood was watching a certain channel, it would stop getting broadcast. That freed up bandwith for other things like internet. Once you would tune to a channel, a request would go to the head-end, it would quicky figure out if the channel is being broadcast in your area. If not, a request would go to the content delivery system to start feeding it to the QAM and then obtain what frequency the channel was on, and finally relay that back to the settop box which would tune and start the decoding process.

Rather impressive tech but again, this would add a bit more latency to that particular channel switching.

And that's one of the reasons things seem worse: there are massive, clever efforts to provide an infinity of options, but they're not completely seamless. Compared to the do-one-thing-and-one-thing-only appliances of yesteryear, it necessarily looks bad, especially when looking through the memory's rose-tinted glasses.

Nope, the STB has everything it needs to decrypt the channels you have access to. Tuning live TV channels happens 100% on the box. The only exception (a technology called Switched Digital Video) is just a way to save bandwidth on the cable, nothing to do with conditional access.

If I unplug my internet connection, my box won't let me do much at all. If I press pause or fast forward it just tells me the operation isn't authorized.

That's a weird system, certainly not the standard way of doing things on a traditional cable TV system.

I think it's pretty normal these days. The cable companies sell the data on what people watch, where the rewind, pause, fast forward, etc...

No, it's absolutely not normal for a regular cable DVR to tie authorization for DVR functionality to an Internet connection.

My last two have been like that. Try unplugging your internet connection then playing something you recorded earlier. If you have an AT&T or DirectTV DVR, it won't play.