On Fri, 9 May 2008 12:42:03 -0400 TheWebJunkie@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:
| On Fri, May 9, 2008, 11:10am t-tammaru@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(Tam) wrote:
|
|> "8VSB is 8VSB. There is no way anybody could
|>tell what the signal source is. In fact, if there is 8VSB
|>on the cable and you do a channel scan on a TV
|>that has bot 8VSB and QAM, you would have to
|>lie to your TV and tell it to do an OTA scan when
|>looking for 8VSB channels on cable."
|
| The question is, when your TV does an OTA scan, does it look only at the
| VHF and UHF channels? Although cable channels 65 through 107 overlay
| UHF channels 14 through 51 between approximately 470 and 700 MHz, the
| channel boundaries of one band are offset from the other. Not to
| mention that cable channels 95 through 99 overlay the FM and aircraft
| bands.
|
| Also, if an OTA scan looks only for 8VSB and a cable scan looks only for
| QAM, Comcast would not be able to use 8VSB for broadcast channels and
| still use QAM for premium cable channels. But, the Comcast guy said
| that it was their mission to make Comcast compatible with OTA. I
| personally cannot understand why they would do that if it means halving
| their bandwidth.
It's unclear what they mean. Are they going to only carry ONE program
from
each station? That will drive more people to OTA and maybe even drop
cable.
OTOH, they may prefer basic tier customers to do just that. But with ONE
program per station, downconverted to SD, and well compressed, they can
get
a typical basic tier on just 3 or 4 6-MHz frequency slots.
OTOH, maybe they are looking at carrying all the channel streams from the
OTA
stations. In many areas, additional networks and interesting programming
is
coming from those. But, they could do this just as easily with QAM, so it
is still unclear why.
The ability to use 8VSB-only CECBs might be the reason.
--
|WARNING: Due to extreme spam, I no longer see any articles originating
from |
| Google Groups. If you want your postings to be seen by more
readers |
| you will need to find a different place to post on Usenet.
|
| Phil Howard KA9WGN (email for humans: first name in lower case at
ipal.net) |
|
