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Are You Being Cheated by Digital Cable?
Lauren Weinstein writes "Even though your cable company may claim that a channel is in a digital tier that you're paying for, they may be sending it to you in analog form, with associated negative effects. Surprise! Are You Being Cheated by Digital Cable? 'You're paying for digital, you should get digital. Outside of the lower video and audio quality that can be present on many analog feeds, third-party devices (like cableCARD TiVos) which could otherwise record a digital signal directly, will be forced to re-digitize an analog signal, with inevitable quality loss in the process. But how to know for sure if a channel is digital or analog as received?'"
and it doesn't surprise me ... I finally dumped cable because too many channels came in looking like fuzzy analog channels, even though they were supposed to be all digital.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
this message brought to you by direct TV and dish network, losing signal from thunder storms and tree branches for over a decade!!! Seriously this was news like a decade ago.
A 30 minute show, without ads, is a 21 minute show.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I only wanted analog cable, because I have two Series2 TiVos, but I ended up getting digital cable because it's cheaper and still includes all the analog channels. (It's a promotional price, but I'm still saving $12/mo for N months.)
When the promotion expires, the price is only $1/mo more than plain analog cable. At that point, I'll give back the cable box -- it isn't even hooked up, but Comcast insisted I take one -- and save a buck a month by going back to analog.
See, when you sign up for digital cable, you're doing them a favor. They want you to have digital cable so that (1) you'll be tempted to buy On Demand movies, (2) you'll have to pay them to lease that godawful box, (3) you'll be tempted to pay for one of their DVRs because third-party ones don't fully work with the box(*), and (4) once everyone is a digital subscriber, they can switch off the analog feeds to free up bandwidth and sell you more services.
(* Yes, there are DVRs that accept CableCards, but they're prohibitively expensive, you have to pay for the cards, and we've all heard how much trouble it is to get a CableCard installed correctly.)
You're sure not helping yourself. Anyone who's ever used a cable box knows how much they blow. Changing channels is slow; and if you use a cable box with your own DVR, you can only record one channel at a time, your recordings will have cable-box banners all over them, and you'll have the ghettoest house on the block with that little infrared "blaster" dangling around.
And what do you get in exchange for that hassle... marginally better picture quality? Maybe not even that, because you're just trading analog noise for MPEG artifacts and blocking. Even if you do get a better picture overall, how long will that stay exciting? A week? After that, you won't notice the picture quality, but you'll be dealing with the drawbacks of digital cable forever.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Transitioning to what? Illegal downloads? Cable is too expensive compared to simply stealing the stuff?
What you're saying, I hope, is that for now you're willing to be behind on your shows, and you'll instead buy or rent entire seasons on DVD, or just stick to rented films, until legal downloads / a la carte cable becomes available. I'd suggest iTunes at well under your $5 an episode target, but I assume this is too low-quality for you.
Or maybe you'll just steal it.
My antenna gives me what is really a wireless video stream of 19 Mb/s in MPEG-2.
It's not like in the age of BitTorrent that you really need to be beholden to the cable companies, unless you have a real need for college football or MLB.
Don't forget what uncle Milt Friedman taught us: people vote with their feet. If you don't like what the cable company is doing to you, get a dish, an antenna or just download the shit out of everything you want.
Between my antenna and BT I'm pleased as punch paying practically nothing for the few TV programs I bother to watch. As long as the NFL stays on local TV, I could care less. And MY HD is just gorgeous.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
The down side of ala carte is there are no guarantees so it's a major risk to produce content. When they do a series say Firefly there's a major investment in just doing the first episode. Generally they can't repay the first episode with one showing so they do it by getting an 8 to 12 episode guarantee. If there's no guarantee of a return then they'll be hesitant to do a pilot let alone a season's worth. Without a guaranteed time slot they have to heavily advertise so people will even know about the show. It means more money not less. Commercials suck and there's too many of them on current television but commercial contracts and guaranteed broadcast slots make producing a series possible. Sure some shows can be done that way but without guaranteed revenue most shows won't get made. One of the favored examples Firefly was considered a marginal show and was only produced because Joss had a solid track record so they were willing to take the risk. In an ala carte system they never would have taken the risk. Don't worry about producing numbers to show fans could have supported it. Go back in time and assume you'd never heard of Firefly. Will you put money up sight unseen to promise to buy the show without seeing an episode? Studios finance pilots all the time and few get produced as a series. I understand people think an ala carte system will save them money but the truth is radically less content will be produced and some of the things not produced are likely to be the next Firefly. The system is broken but there's no ideal solution.
I'm not condoning actions such as delivering a channel in Analog that you are paying to receive in Digital, but my question to you as Devil's advocate is this: You ask how you can be sure you are receiving the channel in digital; if you can't tell the difference, can it really bother you that much?
And I'm not talking digital as in ATSC (HDTV), because there's really no way to fake that; I mean the regular cable channels that get broadcast in "digital" format but really there's not much difference.
Aikon-
If water scenes macroblock, it's digital. If you get fuzziness on letters and text, it's analog. I was agast at a Direct TV broadcast of a college football game. HDTV format, correct colors, and such huge compression that the screen just blocked whenever there was fast action...what was the point of HDTV then ? Much like sound has been "dumbed down" for the iPod generation and digital satellite radio, you can expect the providers to send out the lowest level product that the masses will accept. For the time being, I get HDTV over the air...where if they don't sub'channel too much, it still looks great. Digital is in theory perfect...but then the marketers and suits get involved.