Canadian Broadband → Rogers quarterly profits..

We have four channels OTA. Cable is a necessity.

I was up for a job at Robbers a number of years back, and was told it was 50% at the time, guess they need to make more money off the backs of their employees.

Well, yes and no. We have come to expect more variety in our television viewing, but we've reached a point like the NHL where the huge number of teams has resulted in talent dilution. We're at a point where we have so many channels on cable we have programming dilution ... repeats like crazy. You can watch the same episode of the same program as often as half a dozen times a day on the same channel You can watch the same repeated programs on half a dozen different channels at different times as well! They make / buy a dozen episodes of programs and build a channel around them. We used to talk about "summer reruns" ... now it's reruns all year. Let's show the same movies a dozen times every few months. How many James Bond Marathons can we have in a month!

So, no, cable isn't a necessity other than the fact that our "network television" quality is very degraded so OTA doesn't give us the diversity of programs we've come to enjoy. We could live without Television altogether. When I go to England, I might watch an hour or 2 in a month!

In this part of the country, the video is so degraded for OTA, even for those four channels, that cable is a necessity.

I can understand that ... it's not made better by the moves to digital transmission systems and often lower power transmitters, not the mention the fact that we tend not to want to put up the needed larger antenna arrays on our houses ... the ones sold now are small with a dipole and one director if you're lucky!