Craig Birkmaier wrote: > It boils down to opportunity costs for the spectrum currently > dedicated to the analog tiers. IF they can make enough ADDITIONAL > money re-assigning that spectrum to digital cable and broadband > services, THEN they will shut down the analog tiers and deploy > various solutions for those who do not have digital tuners: Right. And it appears that they are doing so. > Keep in minds that hardly ANY of the HD capable TVs shipped to > date have digital cable tuners in them. Only a tiny percentage > have one-way cable cards, and virtually none have two-way cable > cards. Actually, almost all, perhaps all, new DTVs do in fact have cable tuners (and demods and decoders). I don't know of any that do not. What they don't often have, until now, is CableCard. So the digital cable programs they can decode are only the unencrypted variety. In this market, that means all channels, including HD, that are available OTA are available unencrypted over cable. Lack of CableCard support is probably due almost entirely to consumers marching in lock step to the tune of the cable companies. But that will likely change, with this new agreement between Sony and all the major cable companies. Bert ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways: - Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at FreeLists.org - By sending a message to: opendtv-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word unsubscribe in the subject line.