Re: Comcast and 8VSB

On Fri, 09 May 2008 18:06:20 GMT Wes Newell <w.newell@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
wrote:

| IMO, it would be a smart move on their part. It's a win win situation. 
| They get a lot of extra bandwidth doing away with NTSC. Customers get 
| better pictures and those with newer TV's don't need a cable box for
basic 
| service. And those without can use cheap DTV converter boxes. I'd also 
| guess they will serve nothing but SD over this. 

Going all digital is the wise thing for cable companies to do.  The
question
is the QAM vs. 8VSB point.  And are the OTA stations going to be
duplicated
in both QAM and 8VSB on the same wire.  And are they going to pack only
one
program from each station into fewer channels or are they going to carry
the
whole 19.39mbps from each station?  I know big cor****ate executives are
loath
to ever explain what they are doing, but it would be nice to get an
official
story from Comcast about this.

I would prefer they take the full trans****t bit stream from each station
with
channel identification intact, and pack them in pairs into QAM256 streams,
leaving them unencrypted.  But I can see the issue where basic tier
customers
will now need a box.  Who pays for that box?  The basic tier customers
don't
want to.  The cable company doesn't want to.  So get the government to
cover
$40 of it with cheap CECBs.  But, is recovering less bandwidth worth that?
It might well be.

Now the government will have to deal with the added demand in the coupon
program that wasn't intended for this, but would otherwise be hard to
stop.

-- 
|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) |