[opendtv] Re: Cheap SDTV

  • From: "John Shutt" <shuttj@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2007 08:46:34 -0400

In the early days of cable, a converter box was required to receive the mid-band channels, as the televisions of the day only had the traditional VHF-UHF tuners in them, and couldn't get those frequencies.


The cables companies took advantage of this by offering a basic tier consisting of channels 2-13 that could be received without a cable box, and a premium tier that required a box to tune in the cable only channels. The movie channel HBO was also in this tier, and was available for an additional subscription fee. If you paid for HBO you received a different cable box that allowed tuning the mid-band channel it was on.

Enter my room mate in the Air Force. He had a brand new Sony television that had 16 preset buttons instead of dual VHF-UHF rotary tuners. Each button was tuned with a thumbwheel. Guess what? We could tune in any of the midband channels including HBO with only the basic subscription! Eventually, variactor tuning and cable ready tuners became commonplace, and the cable companies started to use scrambling and traps to control access to the various tiers of service.

Enter the FCC tuner mandate. What this has done is to force manufacturers to include an ATSC tuner into their sets. However, once you do that, you have 90% of what you need to also include a QAM tuner for digital cable. Currently, cable companies are relying on cable boxes to control access to the expanded digital tier of service. With the recent availability of so many digital cable ready television sets, how long before they begin to encrypt those digital channels as well? I'm sure in some markets it has already happened, but not in mine (yet.)

John


----- Original Message ----- From: "John Limpert" <john.a.limpert@xxxxxxxxx>


While shopping at Best Buy yesterday, I saw a 14" CRT SDTV on the
shelf, priced at about $125. I played with it a little bit, but the
in-house cable feed was limited to two digital channels and no analog
channels. Still, that's the cheapest, and smallest, set that I've seen
with NTSC and ATSC tuners.




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