ComCast stopping analog delivery
 

I received notice this week that ComCast will stop all analog service later this year. The first set top convertor will be free, for each one after that is $6.85 per month. Right now I have 5 analog sets in use. I will replace my rear projection analog CRT when it needs a big repair with an HD digital set. Spending twenty bucks a month for the other analogs rubs me the wrong way. I wonder if direct satt. with multiple receivers might be better? HURUMPH!:no:
Anybody else get similar notices?
Richard.

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ComCastic!
 

I guess they have to pay for those cute turtle commercials some how!

And to think market hype said cable and sat viewers would not be affected by the switch. Why am I not surprised?

I'm calling The Slowskys!!!

It won't, it's a completely independent action by the (unprintable) (unprintable) (unprintable) (unprintable) cable companies, THEY too want to squeeze more $$ and bandwith out of the wire....

I hate THEM as much as used car salesmen, the phone company and Quentin Tarantino, with the electric company jockeying for place in the pack...

cable and the cbs color system
 

I don't know about cable in your areas but mentioning cable and digital to is like reviving the cbs color system to receive HDTV. The picture quality on a digital set with cable makes many question whether the set is working properly with the smeary pictures and noise.

Didn't you forget the oil companies there too?

Cable "service" providers
 

After I received the "exciting" news from Comcast I called to verify the greed, no, I mean the service and after confirming it was true I suggested that before Comcast tries the "new & exciting" change to all digital that they should spend less money begging for my data service and attempt to provide 31 days of high quality, no herringbone or grainy picture basic cable without service interuptions. I received a nice email thanking me for my "helpfull" suggestions.
Richard.:thumbsdn:

This change will happen everywhere some sooner then others. If there are no over the air analog signals after the cut off why should a cable company use all the space so cable ready sets can still be used without a box. Analog NTSC is on it's death bed. Customers want more HD channels so the space has to come from somewhere. The larger systems already have all the channels digital so most customers won't notice the change. It is possible to hook more then one set up to a box the only problem is if you watch more then one channel at the same time.

The day that Comcast:thumbsdn: switches basic analog cable service off is the day that I switch them off and go with satellite based TV. If I have to have a set-top box for every television in the house it may as well be a satellite box.:finger: I am sure that I won't be alone.

Why wait? Do it now, you won't be disappointed. :D

Greed
 

Why should a cable company provide analog? Customer convience so they don't have to have the pia set top converter boxes. How much of their customer base know or care about the difference in the delivery system, I think most customers will not see a difference on any but their main HD TV. Where is the bandwidth going to come from? Lose some of the pay per view and or movie on demand space, or some of Comcast preview channels. It is possible to have more than one set hooked to a converter box as long as they watch the same channel, How useful is that, Not at all. When the time comes I will install direct broadcast satt. systems for all TV's and hope to never have to deal with Comcast again. They can not provide decent basic service in the South Florida area. Having said all that I admit that I would have preffered an HD system that is backward compatible like NTSC was. Not only for the above reasons but my collection of portable B&W and color sets will become old paperweights. I also realize that collectors make up about one tenth of one percent of the population. Excuse the rant.

I have cable service (Time Warner) at my main residence, and satellite (DirecTV) at my second home, and I would take cable over satelite any time. With cable I get video on demand, real impulse pay per view, high speed internet that is really fast and reliable (unlike DSL), and a set top box with a channel lineup that makes sense, unlike the satelite lineup that has dozens of blank and promotional channels interspersed with the real channels. If cable was available at my second home, I'd switch in a minute.

quality service
 

Here in the Pinecrest area of Miami the DSL service is far better as far as outages than the high speed data service offered by cable. Neighbors who have cable data service have several outages a month. I guess it depends on the luck of the draw and where you live as to service quality.

In this part of the city satellite sucks. A little rain and no picture. The cable service is much more reliable. However the telephone service Verizon is coming with a much superior delivery FIOS: fiberoptics straight to your bedroom. I have seen it in the neighboring areas and it is awesome. The cable people dread FIOS.

Comcast
 

I have 3 sets and a HDVR in daily use and only one digital HD box. This will not make me happy. The 70 analog channels with no box is the big reason I have Comcast in this house. I do have Dish in home #2 but only have 2 boxes feeding 4 sets and a VCR and that works out ok. I just recently saw an X-10 for a rebroadcast system to send 1 box anywhere in the house. I see a way to have just the HD box and one regular box that will send it's RF out to the other tv's in the house using the existing coax.

So what available options are there as far as convertor boxes from digital to analog, if you wanted to stay with Comcast but didn't want to have to pay them a ridiculous $7 a month for their box?

AS I see it the big issue here is not Analog vs Digital, but the Bandwidth. The satelite and cable providers all want to provide more bang for the buck on existing available bandwidth.

I understand the conversion from analog to digital. However the real issue is the amount of compression beng used. The more the head end compresses, the lousier the picture becomes, but the tradeoff is that the cable provider is able to offer more chanels int he same amount of bandwidth.

Moving to digital is a good thing, but too much compression for the sake of craming an unrealistic number of chanels into a given bandwidth, is a bad thing.

I have an old style 10 foot c-band dish. The picture quality generally much better than the little dishes (Dish and DirectTv). However depending on what chanel I am watching, I may have low amounts of compression or high amounts. Last night I watched a movie tha was so badly compressed that the images were wavering and out of phase not to mention the poor resolution. It was a digital signal, but so highly compressed that the picture quality sucked big time. By the same token, I get the primary signal of Discovery HD theater, and that picture is second to none.

Over the air network digital transmitions from the major networks can be fantastic. Many of the prime time shows, and sporting events are now in HD. Tonight Show is great every night. Golf on tv is unbelievable, when the shots are done from a stationery HD camera, but the hand held cameras used by the camera men that walk around usually are of much poorer quality. HD is stil in its early stages. Just because you are watching a "HD" transmission dosent mean your will halways have a HD quality picture.

And of course Digital does not mean HD in any way, shape or form.

But back to my big dish. I get hundreds of chanels, both east coast and west coast feeds. I subscribe to all the premium chanels, HBO, Showtime, Stars, Cinemax, The Move Chanel, Flix, Sundance, Encore etc, and dozens of the usual basic package chanels that you normally expect on your cable or small dish. The difference is that my cost is about %30 less than cable or the small dish.

My annual subrscription is only about $750 (62.50/month) Warner cable wanted over $95/month for the same amount of programming. For me, at least, this ist he best way to get my television. There are some inconveniences, like being able to only watch this on 1 set at a time, but for our home that works very well.

Because I have 7 Televisions in the house and I hate those set-top boxes and having to rent them from the cable company. Only one of those TVs is HD and we rarely turn on the digital cable box to watch. If there is a ballgame or something on one of the basic HD channels we may turn it on, otherwise we watch the standard extended basic channels (networks, FOX, CNN occasionally, the Discovery channel, the History channel, and the Weather channel). The other 6 TVs are mostly for short duration convenience watching as opposed to sitting down and watching for several hours at a time. Having the ability to surf by simply using the Televisions tuner is more desirable to me than having to look through a directory to choose which program to watch. Sometimes surfing produces a surprise or two that is worthwhile. It is slow and difficult to surf with a set top box.

That's a long answer to a short question. The short answer is that I don't like to be forced to rent and use set-top converter boxes.

Cablecard's will be big in a few years. All those boxes end up costing a lot of money for the cable operator.

Thats the spirit!!!!:rant: :gigglemad :pistols: :uzi:

We can only hope that they don't come up with some cockamamie copyrighted encryption....

BUT I wanna see them go DOWN......

I DID to my GREAT delight, years ago, witness the "death rattle" and final auctioning off of, an OVER THE AIR, SUBSCRIPTION / PAY PER VIEW television operation (Channel 44) in the Chicago area .

I am having some wierd electrical problem in my house that killed the outlet for my living room tv. I havent had time to track it down, so I have been using the roundie which means I have to sit in a less comfortable chair. I have watched almost no tv lately. Call me a dreamer, but I truly hope that when tv suddenly goes blank for a lot of people, they realize that internet, dvd, (or real life) fills the broadcast tv time quite nicely. I'd love to see a new-coke style backfire. ntsc 'classic'!

I'd be willing to bet that 90% of the tv veiwing public knows nothing about HD vs Analog,what they do know is that they are constantly told that HD is better,so like every other red blooded American they have to keep up with everybody else,why do they need hd? because sammy know nothing that works at Best Buy told them they need it & all the commercials on tv back him up.

The same 90% of the tv veiwers have no idea how to calibrate their own television sets or their Home Theater recievers.Same goes for HDMI 1.3,all people know is that its new so they MUST HAVE IT.

As far as im concerned the whole HD & HDMI 1.3 craze is driven by the industry, not consumers.:thumbsdn:

I used to build boxes for OnTV back then. There were stores that sold "a bag of parts" that coincidentally was the complete kit, but they couldn't tell you it was for a decoder box. Those early scrambling methods seem primitive now. Later, Sportsvision was added, on Channel 60. They were only testing, not even in service yet, and we were already adding two-channel switches to our boxes... It was more fun to build the boxes than to actually watch anything with them, since the sound was mediocre, the movies were edited, and of course they were the dreaded "pan-and-scan" format.

And today I find this,
 

THE CONSUMER ELECTRONICS ASSOCIATION reassured the NAB that digital-to-analog converters will be available to "every interested American." The converters will be necessary for analog TV sets when analog broadcasts cease in February 2009.

It's a conspiracy! Where is Muldar & Scully when we really need them?

I agree with you about HDMI 1.3 (as opposed to "regular" HDMI). It accomplishes nothing that even the tech-minded HD-watching crowd needs, but plenty of people think they need it or are waiting to buy equipment with it.

Regarding the end of analog cable and box-rental costs, there is always the option to drop your cable service entirely and use a "real TV" antenna. You can already buy a convertor box for less than US$100 to connect it to your analog-only TV sets.

We had a channel 68 that was a subscription service. "Wromentco Home theture". Seen the usual bootleg boards and such. When analog stereo audio for TV came out, one of the manufacturers (think it was Blonder Tongue) of the official descrambler boxes freaked out, making a statement saying something like TV stereo was some sort of communist conspericy. Thing was, it was fairly easy to modify a stereo TV decoder to get the movie soundtrack on the L-R part, and the timing signal to recreate a horizontal frequency pulse to push the horizontal sync pulses back to where they belong. to drive a variable RF attenuator hooked to the video IF.

Channel 68 quit the subscription business around 1985, became an over the air MTV type channel, and later became a home shopping channel, and now is a Spanish language TV channel.

building test boxes
 

In Miami we had OnTV in the late 1970s then HBO on MDS. We built our own converters and microwave down converters when HBO began microwaving their signal to hotels and condos before mass cable was run. It was more fun to build and tune the things than to actually watch the programming.

We had that up here in NYC area. Think they used the same spectra 2.4 gig wi-fi uses. If you still have the dish antennas and the antenna itself (but without the block converter part) you might be able to use it to hunt for wifi hot spots...

Were you one of the 14 or so folks ONTV sued for selling bags of parts or boxes? When that happened I walked on eggshells for a few weeks until it was clear I was in the clear... I only sold upgrade kits (AFC and AGC) for those kits, as I didn't want folks calling me every time it rained.... MY third re-design of the box locked VIR signals (on equipped tv's) where ONTV's boxes wouldn't... internal keyed agc issues, or more accurately, the lack of it. By that time I had something to compare it to.

Remember the "drilling" turn-on mod sheets? To default the potted addressable decoding module? I'm not sure if I actually WAS the first to figure that out...

I never got in trouble, but I had a couple of friends who did. They ran a store called "Azotic Industries".

AFC and AGC would have been nice upgrades-I never knew they were available. There were two box versions that I knew-the first was built into a speaker and had local audio, later there was one with audio re-modulated onto channel 3. There was also a simple mod to install in TV sets internally. It used a J.W. Miller #6333 coil and maybe a cap, to unscramble the picture, and a circuit with an LM565 PLL chip and a transistor for the sound, that you installed on the sound detector output. It was this circuit that was basically the same as the stereo sound subcarrier demodulator, and it also worked on Spectravision audio if I remember right. "Keyed AGC" was always the limitation for this and all the other video-based descramblers.

I never actually hacked one of the "real" ONTV boxes.

"It got my dolly!!!!" - Time to feed the Cable Pig!

Azotic... yes, on Belmont Ave. on Chicago... I remember them, they had a really wide varied assortment of parts...

I used a National chip IIRC that was made to work in descrambler setups (intended for authorized boxes) with a specific intenal breakout of video before the keyed agc was tapped, that allowed the video to be "corrected" before anything was done with it.