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Old 05-17-2010, 11:13 AM
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Jeffhs Jeffhs is offline
<----Zenith C845
 
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: Fairport Harbor, Ohio (near Lake Erie)
Posts: 4,035
Quote:
Originally Posted by peverett View Post
Cable is not the blessing it seems. You are at the mercy of a monopolistic company that will do whatever they can to drain your wallet. I have had three analog channels stolen from my analog cable package and moved to an area where I would need to pay more to see them again. Did they discount my bill? Of course not!. This is theft, the same as if Ford came and took back one of the wheels on my truck and did not pay me for it.

Another issue is how cable treats the local broadcast channels. My over-the-air reception of these with DTV(when the weather is ok-most of the time) is far better than my cable signals for these.

Now, the phone companies(and I am sure cable also) are trying to kill broadcast TV. I am completely against this!!. In fact, I would like to see broadcast TV send some of the channels now seen only on cable/satellite over the air via the DTV sub-channels, reducing the cable/satellite monopoly.
I don't follow you. Why would your OTA reception of broadcast TV be better with DTV than it is over the cable? I would think it would be the other way around. Cable signals, after all, are not affected by weather; on the other hand, a good thunderstorm, rain, or snow can mess up DTV reception royally. I've had cable for years, and the only time I ever saw my cable TV reception ruined was a couple of years ago, when my cable operator, Time Warner, was converting its systems to digital. I remember trying to watch the NBC news one evening, but didn't see more than five minutes of the program if that much--the picture was dropping out every few seconds, and it did so for the duration of the entire newscast. There are occasions when certain channels on my cable are distorted or downright unwatchable, but that's almost certainly due to technical problems at the head end; moreover, it doesn't happen all the time. If it did, TW's phones would be ringing off the hook with calls from angry subscribers, wondering why their cable service is acting up--after all, the subscribers would point out (and they would be right), they have cable to get better reception than they presently get with an antenna. Most people do not understand how cable TV works, but the cable company almost always puts a disclaimer in their literature sent to subscribers at the initial hookup stating that there may be occasional interruptions in transmission due to weather, service outages due to power failures, and other problems beyond the control of the cable operator. The subscriber does not need to know one thing about how cable TV operates to understand this; the only ones who wouldn't understand it would be young children, people who cannot read, or who have mental problems that keep them from understanding even simple concepts.

I'm not following you either on your second point, that the telephone companies are trying to "kill" broadcast television. The phone companies' business is telephone and, nowadays, Internet service, not television, unless you are referring to AT&T which now offers U-Verse television service or Verizon with its FiOS system, both of which hard-wire the user's TV into the wall and do not use satellites or copper coaxial cables.

However, I don't see how these services can or will do away with broadcast TV. The FCC made a huge mistake just under a year ago when they ended NTSC broadcast television in favor of all digital; their reasoning was that they were going to auction off the old analog TV channels for use by public service (police, fire, etc.) and cellular telephone services, claiming the airwaves were too jammed after communications failures during at least one major disaster (Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana five years ago). There are still far too many people who still get their TV reception over the air, with a TV antenna, so the FCC would be making another huge error in judgment if they decided to do away with OTA TV--after all, many people feel that they do not want to pay through the nose for cable or satellite.
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Collecting, restoring and enjoying vintage Zenith radios since 2002

Zenith. Gone, but not forgotten.
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