The law only requires carriage of the local broadcast channels. There's no reason cable companies need to carry any more than the 12 to 20 local broadcast channels in analog. Everything else could go to one form or another of digital carriage.
Its not like cable companies really have to follow the letter of the law for cable boxes. Comcast here in albuquerque doesn't provide active firewire ports on STBs. The law as they say only has to be there not functional. A STB has to support a cablecard doesnt say it has to have a cablecard or a cablecard slot as I'm sure they would claim.
Cablecos sure can cut out about half of their 70 to 80 analog channels and have a basic 40-channel analog lineup. That alone would give them room for another 80 HD channels or whatever other digital stuff they want to put on their systems. The flipside is they would have to reduce prices for analog service a lot, so you can be sure they won't make that cut for awhile.
“An engineer explained to us that hundreds of ear impressions were gathered in the name of research, and while each one obviously boasted its own unique shape and size, one single characteristic remained uniform across the board: the entrance into the ear canal is not a perfect circle, it's an oval.”
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The law only requires carriage of the local broadcast channels. There's no reason cable companies need to carry any more than the 12 to 20 local broadcast channels in analog. Everything else could go to one form or another of digital carriage.
Its not like cable companies really have to follow the letter of the law for cable boxes. Comcast here in albuquerque doesn't provide active firewire ports on STBs. The law as they say only has to be there not functional. A STB has to support a cablecard doesnt say it has to have a cablecard or a cablecard slot as I'm sure they would claim.
Cablecos sure can cut out about half of their 70 to 80 analog channels and have a basic 40-channel analog lineup. That alone would give them room for another 80 HD channels or whatever other digital stuff they want to put on their systems. The flipside is they would have to reduce prices for analog service a lot, so you can be sure they won't make that cut for awhile.