Comcast Digital "Migration?"

[Gerardn3]

My understanding is that cable companies are required by the FCC to provide all local channels via analog until 2012, but all other channels are up to them. I suspect cable companies will gradually reduce the amount of non-local channels on analog over the next couple years, and eventually cut all analog after 2012. After that, you will need a digital QAM tuner or digital cable box to receive any programming from cable.

Cable companies have great incentive to stop analog broadcasting because every analog channel must be fed through the lines to every subscriber at all times. Not only do digital channels use less bandwidth due to compression, they only get sent through the lines after the watcher tunes into them. It's a shame because in my experience the digital boxes are sluggish and often take several seconds to tune in channels, but unfortunately there is no way to avoid the switch to digital.