IPTV's 'Dirty Little Secret' > going back to the 80's

reply to glmclell

Re: going back to the 80's

I dont debate that cable co's no longer charge per outlet. However what he said was;

"remember the 80's, when cable companies used to make you rent their cable box, and it was expensive and they charged for each additional outlet

and then, the fcc which apprently once actually protected consumers instead of industry, passed laws making it illegal to charge for extra outlets or require cable boxes"

Everything mentioned above is still common practice except the per outlet charges. The cable co's require you to rent a cable box if you get digital cable, and they still charge per box.
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I like dogs, guns, and cheeseburgers. Whats your malfunction?

reply to wifi4milez
They don't require a box for basic cable. They can charge a box for expanded cable, or premium channels.
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Plvres crapvlas qvam gladivs

Unless you use premium services, in which case you will need a card from the MSO's. I'm sure they will push the FCC to allow them to use the cards for anything but the basic channels there as well.
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Plvres crapvlas qvam gladivs

reply to SRFireside
Many are already DCR, but they have QAM tuners, so the telcos would then need to use QAM modulation in order for those sets to work properly. And I don't see that happening.

reply to Smokey
Basic cable is going away or gone in most areas. I assume that the cable co's are doing this under the guise of "digital upgrades" but in reality they do it so they can charge you for the box.
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I like dogs, guns, and cheeseburgers. Whats your malfunction?

Actully its because they want to get rid of the bandwith hogging Analog. But of course you can't please everyone. Some people want more Bandwidth intensive services (HD,VOD) and there some people (usually older folks) who won't away from analog only services. So....

reply to wifi4milez

reply to wifi4milez
First of all, the only reason why they would require you to have a black box is because most of the time you will have a "High Definition Ready TV". This is a TV that CAN display high def. pictures but does not have a built in tunner. The Black box is required to view the High Definition channels because it is the only thing that will convert what the cable company feeds thru the coax to a visual signal to your TV.

Also most, if not all cable companies allow for a little card that you can stick in the back of a TV with a built in High Definition Tuner. This is is called a CableCARD, used in order to implement proprietary decoding. The only problem is that it is a one way system, you cannot order PPV or On demand video with it.

So how are you REQUIRED to buy a black box? I can get all the cable I want without a black box, and do.

...please check your facts before you post, as you obviously don't know what your talking about.

Ummm...What the FCC did is to standardize the frequency lineup that was used and require that all new TV sets be capable of recieving them with a standard channel heirarchy. Up to that time there were varying systems (standard, HRC, IRC...)and VCR's and TV's had a varying amount of cable channels built in.

When you use a cable co box, they can assign any channel number they want to any frequency. However, you will notice that when you are using just a TV or a older, non descrambler cable box, the channel number shown will allways correspond to the same station.

They did this to stop the then current practice of charging for a REQUIRED cable box to use the cable syatem, since before this, the cable company could use any channel number/frequency scheme they wanted (such as HRC, which comcast still uses today and IRC which has pretty much died out, for example)And to standardize the system for consumers. This, also is during the time FM service on cable was dying out.

reply to LeftOfSanity

Basic cable is going away or gone in most areas? Really? That's odd, since we have comcasst here and I use regular analog cable every day. it wont change over to digital cable untill there are enough HDTV sets in use where the TV stations have to shut down their analog channels and turn inb their licenses for cancellation, which will be a few years yet since HDTV sets are still to expensive and digital add on boxes for regular analog TV's are mot yet readilly available.

Meanwhile, you notice you have to pay for digital cable (and rent the box that serves up ads between slow assed channel changes-which is the reason they want to hook it to a phone line, as well as PPV, etc) AND pay for the HDTV teir on cable to use your HDTV.

FYI digital cable does not mean it must be HDTV. HDTV is just one optional component of digital cable. Why dont you go read up on the facts before you contest or insult others.
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I like dogs, guns, and cheeseburgers. Whats your malfunction?

Ummm...Isn't that what I said above? Perhaps I missed something...