What Free Cable?

suckass writes: "Apparently if you've got a cable broadband connection from AT&T you can get free basic cable just by splitting the line that goes into your cable modem. News.com has a story about it here."

Comments

They Get Money Anyway

[clinko]

I have ATT cablemodem at my house. Here's how they get their money back.

If you're not ordering cable, and only the cablemodem they charge you an extra 10 dollars.

So... my total comes out to about $55 a month for cablemmodem. Plus tax...

So... Total: $60+ a month for cablemodem

Where does all the $$ go?

[jcsehak]

Everyone I know gets charged about $40/month for basic cable (except in CT, where it's a reasonable $10). Why is it so high? Are they still recouping costs from laying the actual cables? I dunno, they've been around for years, sometimes decades. And don't they make enough money from advertisers? Anyone else remember when cable first came out, they said your monthly fee was so you didn't have to watch commercials? So much for that. I wouldn't mind forking over $40/month if they gave me a good reason why it needed to be that high. Unfortunately, it seems like they're overcharging just because they can, and that's one of the best ways to promote piracy.

Re:Easy to catch

[terrymr]

In England where you're required to have a TV License to watch TV they have vans that drive around trying to detect such leakage from unlicensed TVs.

The also have handheld units for checking apartment buildings too.

Re:Easy to catch

[Bert Peers]

Well I'm not sure how but there must be some way to detect it -- since it happened to me. I didn't have cable TV since I don't have a TV, but after getting a TV card I decided to split and lo and behold, all channels were there. This was after 3 years or so of internet only. But sure enough, after about 6 months they install a filter, so my guess is that I made the split in such a crappy way that it introduced noise on the neighbor's signals (I live in an appartment), they complained, and voila. This is probably like messing with the telephone, you're not allowed to hook up selfmade electronics, but until someone complains about their reception, how will they know. I think the scenario of van-driving cable-polizei is a bit expensive for the very low percentage that doesn't own both -- and they don't just run lists of internet-only customers either since, like I said, it was ok for 3 years.

What's kinda interesting though is that the area around 500 Mhz shows some leakage, maybe the filter is not perfect, or maybe they need to leave that area open because somehow internet hookup requires it -- but in any case that leakage leaves a few channels through. Didn't bother to drop the filter though since nothing interesting was ever on anyway :)

(BTW this is all with UPC in Europe)

Re-broadcasting the signal

[swb]

People do unwittingly broadcast cable TV, by hooking up thier rooftop antenna to the same coax system in some way.

In 1981 we got our first VCR and a camera (dad's business needed a major writeoff). Since I was in 8th grade, I was in charge of hooking it up. According to the documentation, you were absolutely not to hook up the RF Out of the VCR to your rooftop antenna -- it'd make you into your own TV station and the FCC would take away your bike, your baseball glove and make you eat unsweetened cereal for the rest of your life.

Naturally the idea of a video camera and the chance to be our own TV station was too tempting. However, it didn't really work. We had the highest house in our neighborhood and a big antenna on the roof, but we couldn't get our home TV channel (playing lip-sync videos and slow-motion Lego crashes) to come in on any of the neighborhood TVs, all of which were broadcast based since we didn't have cable in Minneapolis.

I guess its a good thing that I didn't know about amplifiers then...