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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.
We have cable (Tivo HD with 2 cableCards, plus an MCE for our XViD movies and playing DVDs) and we're transitioning away quickly. Our cable bill is ridiculous, and more often than not, we'll download torrents of shows we want to watch rather than wait for them to be recorded by the Tivo.
Honestly, I'd rather pay a la carte for shows we like than deal with the cable mess. A la carte would mean better handling of their massive bandwidth, and a better distribution of proceeds for shows. No need for Nielsen when advertisers will know exactly who is buying what.
I think we'd honestly pay $5 for a 30 minute show -- what does it cost in our time preference to sit down for 30 minutes? I'd pay less with ads. If we liked the show,we'd pay for an annual subscription -- giving shows the chance to continue even without massive ad-funding (see: Firefly).
With our 8-12Mbps Comcast Internet (not oversold in our neighborhood, yet), we download moves quickly enough to make it worth the wait. If we like the movie, we'll buy it, but I have no problem reimbursing even without a physical medium to save it.
I can't figure the TV distro system out, really. Sure, the powers-that-be are paying millions (or more) to keep the monopoly they have, but as the next generation ages, I'm sure the old system will hit the toilet, to be replaced by what? Hopefully more a la carte.
On Comcast it's easy to tell analog from digital feeds: on digital cables the S/PDIF signal is present, on analog feeds it is not, so on the analog feeds I need to switch my audio receiver to use the line-level input instead of digital.
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But how to know for sure if a channel is digital or analog as received?'
Look at the noise characteristics. Analog and digital respond to noise differently. Digital pixilates and stutters but otherwise displays a perfect picture. Analog ghosts and snows.
If you're not getting enough noise to tell the difference then smile and be happy because you have a better cable TV signal than most of the rest of us.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
I think the analog vs. digital argument is a bit off-target. The point isn't the type of signal, it's the quality. I've heard people complain about artifacting in their TV shows because cablecasters are using low bitrates or are cutting the S/N ratio too close. I'd much rather have a good analog signal to encode than a crappy digital signal even I could tap it directly.
Begin unscrewing the coax cable from your cable box. As you very, very slowly pull it away, if the signal starts to fade/shows static/etc., it's certainly analog. If, instead, it suddenly goes from perfect, to black, it's digital. Also, in the latter case, it will probably start to show artifacts, perfectly square 16x16 pixel macroblocks that stand out in sharp contrast to the rest of the picture.
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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.
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I get so pissed off at compression artifacts (mosquito noise; banding; blocks in fast-moving, busy shots) that I think I'd *prefer* analog (this is probably a curse of too many years in video post-production where I was paid to notice problems in video). Back when I had analog cable, I almost never had the noise associated with over-the-air analog broadcasts, and of course I didn't have compression artifacts. Alas, that was a long time ago. It really annoys me when cable companies (and others) tout "digital quality!" as if that means anything by itself.
In fact, this is why I haven't bought into HDTV yet -- if I spend a couple grand on a TV and extra per month for HD channels only to see compression artifacts in high resolution, something's getting sent through the front window.
Disclaimer: As mentioned before, I do work for a cable company.
Americans can get their traditional TV through a number of different providers, but it boils down to just a few methods of delivery: direct from the broadcasters over the air, from a satellite, via fiber owned by a telephone company, or via a hybrid fiber/coax network owned by a cable company. Of these options, cable providers are caught in the crossfire of regulatory demands and consumers who don't know enough about the technology itself to know what they really want. You never hear these complaints about satellite/FTTH (FiOS), only because the nature of their medium requires all digital transmission. But is 100% digital always "better" for the consumer? The answer is clearly no, not always.
As I'll explain later, much of the FCC's time is spent regulating the coax providers to help the "smaller players". Really, now...AT&T and Verizon are small players? When will the FCC step in to help the smaller players in the landline voice business, such as Vonage and VOIP? (Hint: they won't.)
Cable has been the incumbent for so long that they have become the Microsoft of TV. If there is any complaining to be done, lets complain about the cable company. But as I said, most consumers don't know what they are complaining about. Let's look at the ramifications if every cable company switched to 100% digital tomorrow...which seems to be to be what people want. Let's do a step by step breakdown:
The infrastructure in most cable systems does not need a rebuild for digital, just a little headend work and some maintenence in the field to fix issues that will visibly affect digital but not analog (CPD, microreflections, etc...). So, BAM! Cable is all digital. What happens the next day?
Firstly, ALL TV's without a digital tuner go dark. Great-aunt Maryrose and Gramma Clara turn on their perfectly good 1988 Zenith, and get static. They now have to go buy new TV's to use cable service, because consumers demanded digital transmission. In fact, this WILL happen when the OTA conversion happens in 2009, but OTA viewers may get subsidized boxes. (It will be interesting to see the FCC enforce the separable security statute with that one.) Cable companies get to eat the cost. In fact, this week the FCC guaranteed that cable companies eat the cost for an additional 3 years. They mandated that all cable providers (coax based only) provide a viewable analog OR digital signal to all subscribers until 2012. Linkage (pdf warning) It would be easier to comply by sticking with analog signals for the mandate, but customers (and the FCC) are demanding digital broadcast.
"But wait," you say, "they can get a digital cable box and keep the older TV!" Well, sure, but then we get to hear about how the cable company is bleeding it's customers dry by charging for equipment. I call horseshit on this one. Cable companies charge an average $7.50 monthly lease fee for the box that costs them $300 upfront, plus maintenance and repair. In "only" 40 months of maintenance free operation of that box, the cable company breaks even. Yeah...that's certainly not what I would call milking the customer.
"Why can't they use a third-party box, like a TiVO?" you might ask. They certainly can but to access encrypted channels, the box will need CableCards, the abomination of technology that they are. I work in the billing department and since they are authorized through our billing software, I support and troubleshoot CableCARDs on a daily basis. They have potential, and would work SO much better if manufacturers would standardize on a set of firmware...but I'm diverging from the point. Besides, the bigger question is "WHY DOESN'T ANYONE ELSE MAKE A 3RD PARTY BOX?!" Personally, I think there is not currently a market for cable boxes. How much money did TiVO lose last quarter? Ah...only $17 million.
khasim (12/9/06): In a blind taste test, more people preferred Coke over the Pepsi that I had previously pissed in.
Bandwidth is not really a problem for HDTV: from what I read, most current HDDVD and BluRay titles are encoded at less than 10Mbps total. Since a DOCSIS modem can pull over 40Mbps from a single 6MHz NTSC channel bandwidth, a digital cable box should be able to squeeze at least three very good quality HD channels in the same bandwidth as one analog channel. With about 900MHz worth of usable downstream bandwidth on coax, there is room for up to 450 high-quality HD channels. Of course, about half of that spectrum is used by analog channels, SD/ED digital channels and cable-modems so there should still be room for 150-200 HQ-HD channels.
As for the processing equipment, the heavy-lifting is at the source where initial encoding is done and at the head-end if there is transcoding to be done. The rest is standard fare digital broadcast over an HFC network just like it is for all other digital cable broadcasts. Since head-ends already have quite a bit of equipment dedicated to each channel they support on their networks, having an extra transcoding/scaling unit in loops that require it is (usually) a minor hurdle.
I feel the cable to see if the signal is rough and bumpy, or smooth and wavy. Why, how do you do it?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
HDTV is actually better-looking TV (doesn't help the plot, unfortunately, except for sports channels where it really _is_ better when you can see the puck.) But Standard-Definition Digital TV isn't better than analog - it degrades differently with noise, but its primary advantage is that it's easier to put more channels on the cable using digital. The channels you get don't look better than the ones you get on analog, but the channels you didn't get on analog might look better in digital.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks