Re: Comcast and 8VSB

In article <g02bgk422sd@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>, phil-news-nospam@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 
wrote:

> One issue is if all the cable companies in the country did this: change
OTA
> carriage over to 8VSB and tell their customers to go get a CECB, this
would
> end up swamping the coupon program.  I would be LMAO-ing if they did
that :)

But then you have another problem. You would then have a certain number 
of channels on the cable being broadcast in 8VSB, which NO EXISTING 
CABLE BOXES WILL BE ABLE TO RECEIVE. So they would have to duplicate 
those channels in QAM for the existing QAM boxes. There goes your 
digital bandwidth efficiency right there. At that point they might as 
well have kept the low channels in analog and not worried about what 
ingress interference would do to the digital signal on low-VHF.

Just this alone makes me sure that they won't put 8VSB modulation on 
cable, even if it means that viewers could use a converter box.

Also, when does the converter box rebate program end? By the time they 
could implement this, the rebate could already be gone, so using it as a 
way to subsidize cable boxes wouldn't work.