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?'"

Comments

Very interesting ...

[ScrewMaster]

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.

Re:Very interesting ...

[Maller]

Why does everyone assume digital means better? In my experience "fuzziness" with cable is usually cause by horrible wiring (no grounding, split many times, etc.) within a house/apartment, not an inherently bad signal. Cable companies still have a significant portion of their customers using the analog signals because they either don't have digital cable or have more than one TV but don't want to have multiple cable boxes. Thus, the analog signals tend to be relatively clean. The purely digital channels, on the other hand, look to be encoded at such a low bitrate that one can easily see macroblocks continuously.

Who actually pays more for digital cable?

[Mr2001]

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.