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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.
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.