Re: Do I need to pay the cable company for a (non-HD) digital cable box?
- From: Alan F <afiggatt1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 29 May 2007 13:25:42 GMT
dgates wrote:
On Mon, 28 May 2007 22:28:14 -0700, dgates <dgates@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
We've uprgraded to all HD stuff in our main family room, but I find
myself with an extra TiVo (or two), complete with lifetime
subscriptions.
I'm thinking of just hooking up a TiVo to a TV in my office, but with
our Time Warner cable service, I won't be able to get channels above
100 without paying $8 a month for their digital cable box. It seems
like, for that price, I might as well pay $16 a month and just use
their HD DVR. (Yes, the TV in the office is HDTV, but I don't watch
much HD, outside of DVDs anyway.)
That's probably more detail than anyone needs, but I thought it might
affect someone's answer. So, what I'm wondering is:
Do I have to pay that $8 every month if I want the digital cable
channels above 100 (BBCA, FMC, TCM, TRAV, etc.)? Or could I just buy
some box and stop paying the $8? It seems like it would have to be
under $100, shipped, to be worth the effort.
Any thoughts?
A couple more things:
1. If this is all covered in a FAQ somewhere, please let me know.
2. If I'm trying to do something that's against the law, again, let me
know.
I'm pretty sure that my current cable box (that I rent from Time
Warner Cable) is the Motorola Digital Cable Box Converter DCT2224,
because it looks exactly like the top one in this photo:
http://tinyurl.com/2cqqfh
The odds are that all of the digital cable channels other than your
local broadcast stations are encrypted. If your HD TV has a built-in
digital cable QAM tuner, hook it up and do a channel scan. It may find
the local broadcast stations for ABC, NBC, CBS, etc as unscrambled QAM
channels.
Comcast and the other big cable companies have been to implement
digital simulcast of the analog channels in many areas. When you hook up
a digital STB or DVR in those areas, the box automatically displays the
digital version of the analog channels with better picture quality. The
real reason for digital simulcast is to wean people off of the analog
channels so they start to shut down the analog channels and eventually
go all digital. In the city of Chicago, Comcast recently shut down the
analog version of all the national cable channels and left only around
35 analog local broadcast and local government / public access channels.
Subscribers were forced to switch to digital STBs or have TVs/Tivos with
cable cards if they wanted to continue to watch CNN, USA, TCM, and so on.
If you want to buy a STB or have the TV to display the full set of
digital cable channels, it needs to have a cable card capability. The
cable card provides the de-encryption codes for the cable channels. You
have to lease the cable card from the cable company and they usually
charge about $5/month for a card, so you don't save much money with it.
The current generation of cable cards also do not support two way
communications, so they do not support Video On Demand, PPV, or guide
data. Quite frankly, you are better off getting the HD-DVR from the
cable company for $16/month until we get lower cost HD-DVRs with next
generation cable cards that we can buy. That is what I'm doing with
Verizon Fios.
Since you are a TWC subscriber, there is another issue and that is TWC
is implementing Switched Digital Video (SDV) in their areas. Look this
up for an explanation, but SDV means that a Series 3 Tivo or TV with
cable card won't be able to view all the digital cable channels. TWC is
doing this to free up bandwidth so they can add HD channels. Yes, this
is all very complicated...
Hope this helps!
Alan F
.
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