W.O.W. → Hey WOW Dan (Cable Card and broadcast channels question)

I've been wondering this for a while.

Will WOW let me keep renting a cable card and just leave it unactivated for everything but broadcast channels?

I'm not even sure if or how this works, but I believe the card will pick up those channels even before it gets activated.

When I was waiting for my activation when I first bought my HD Prime I could watch my NBC/ABC/Fox, etc.

So if I cancel digital basic, will they let me still rent the cable card and just keep it for the broadcast?

That way I could buy internet from WOW and it saves me from having to hook up an Antenna for the free stations.

Part of why I think this works is because the CableCard tuners support unencrypted ClearQAM (or at least years ago when I had a Ceton that was the case).

Does WOW still have any unencrypted ClearQAM broadcast channels?

Last I checked (over a year ago), all of the basic cable channels (in SD only) as well as the local broadcast channels (both SD and HD versions) were unencrypted QAM.

Depending on the device you have, you may not even need a cablecard at all. The Ceton InfiniTV products and the Silicon Dust HDHomerun Prime can all operate in QAM mode when there is no cablecard installed.

However, one little gotcha with this is that, without the cablecard, you will need to do channel scans to find what frequencies/program numbers the channels are located on. Every time WOW re-arranges the channels, you would need to re-scan for them again. In the past (at least prior to 3 years ago, which was the last time I regularly used clear QAM) WOW was pretty good at only doing this every couple years.

Good info, thanks. I suspected this was the case, I completely forgot the HD Homerun Prime still acted as a ClearQAM tuner without the card.

LordKronos is correct. You can get the clearQAM channels, as long as you continue with basic cable. You can drop the digital basic package, and just use the InfiniTV as a clearQAM tuner no problem. There would be no reason to keep the cable card at that point, so you would want to remove that so you don't get charged for it.

(Using an HD Homerun not InfiniTV so may be different).

Ok I just confirmed after canceling my Digital packages that the cable card does continue to pull in all of the free channels from the card.

I'm planning on keeping the card, partly because they have never charged me for it (and I think it's only $3 if they do) and because I'll never have to scan for QAM and change those as stated above.