This is an asinine move, but whatever. I fully expect my analog cable signal to go away eventually, and I'll lose most of the channels that I can watch on my PC with analog cable. I also have an HDHomerun, which works great and the picture is much better than analog cable on my connected PCs, but the clear QAM channel selection on Comcast SUCKS A$$. It is barely more than over the air digital. What they should do, but probably won't, is drop analog altogether, have a basic digital cable package where every channel is clear QAM, and only scramble/encrypt the higher tier digital channels. They are just giving me more reason every day to drop cable, and drop my comcast phone line too, and just buy by internet access from them, and an nice roof antenna for OTA broadcasts.
"What they should do, but probably won't, is drop analog altogether"
That's what they (comcast) is already trying to do. It's the DTA transition; not to be confused with DTV transition. DTV only revolves around over the air proramming. DTA is the cable company moving their own network over to all digital. If the cable companies wanted to, they could continue broadcasting analog on their HFC networks as long as they want. The problem is they lose out on massive bandwidth. For every 1 analog channel you can get around 7-12 digital or 3-5 HD. Or you can use the bandwidth for broadband (ie docsis3.0 speeds).
There was an article on here a few days ago that showed a Comcast programming update that is slated for the week of DTV transition. Roughly 40 more channels would be added to the Oregon market as a result of DTA transition.
“An engineer explained to us that hundreds of ear impressions were gathered in the name of research, and while each one obviously boasted its own unique shape and size, one single characteristic remained uniform across the board: the entrance into the ear canal is not a perfect circle, it's an oval.”
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This is an asinine move, but whatever. I fully expect my analog cable signal to go away eventually, and I'll lose most of the channels that I can watch on my PC with analog cable. I also have an HDHomerun, which works great and the picture is much better than analog cable on my connected PCs, but the clear QAM channel selection on Comcast SUCKS A$$. It is barely more than over the air digital. What they should do, but probably won't, is drop analog altogether, have a basic digital cable package where every channel is clear QAM, and only scramble/encrypt the higher tier digital channels. They are just giving me more reason every day to drop cable, and drop my comcast phone line too, and just buy by internet access from them, and an nice roof antenna for OTA broadcasts.
"What they should do, but probably won't, is drop analog altogether"
That's what they (comcast) is already trying to do. It's the DTA transition; not to be confused with DTV transition. DTV only revolves around over the air proramming. DTA is the cable company moving their own network over to all digital. If the cable companies wanted to, they could continue broadcasting analog on their HFC networks as long as they want. The problem is they lose out on massive bandwidth. For every 1 analog channel you can get around 7-12 digital or 3-5 HD. Or you can use the bandwidth for broadband (ie docsis3.0 speeds).
There was an article on here a few days ago that showed a Comcast programming update that is slated for the week of DTV transition. Roughly 40 more channels would be added to the Oregon market as a result of DTA transition.