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

reply to wifi4milez

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
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.