Comcast in my area is finally getting around to shutting down their last analog channels, basically the locals and a handful of basic cable, numbers 1-30. Analog Channels 31-99 were shut down about two years ago.
Why not just dispense with the low definition feeds entirely and use the customer’s boxes to downconvert if they don’t subscribe to high definition? It seems wasteful of bandwidth to have two versions of most of the channels being broadcast. They spent a nontrival amount of money on low definition boxes for people that needed them in order to keep getting low definition cable.
people still display on analog sets with lower resolution. people would resist paying for digital boxes for each set. the elderly (tv sets and customers) have to die off first.
The short answer is that they are required to carry the local channels under what are called must-carry regulations. For all-digital systems like Fios or Uverse, there is an exemption from the requirement to carry analog channels as it is impossible to receive any channels at all on these systems without a set-top box.
It’s also not all that much bandwidth to maintain legacy compatability and deliver 20 or so basic channels, vs however many hundreds of HD channels, on-demand movies, broadband data, etc.
Uh, that’s what I’m saying. Comcast is going all digital in two months, so since everyone will require boxes to receive any channel (except clear QAM HD locals for the time being) why not give people boxes that can convert HD to SD as opposed to maintaing SD digital feeds?
I believe the DTA boxes rented for a buck or two a month on all digital systems do just that - to the great unhappiness of those with a HD set on the kitchen counter…
Officially DTA means ‘digital terminal adaptor’ but it might as well be ‘digital to analog’
I believe DTA boxes convert from the standard definition digital feed, not the high definition feed.
But yeah, they suck, and now Comcast is starting to charge me rent for it. At least they could have provided composite video and analog outputs. I have one for my old tube TV in the basement (As well as two HD boxes for the upstairs TV).
Comcast has been “going all digital” for years now. It is simply a matter of them finally getting to your neighborhood. Comcast stopped transmitting analog to us 2 or 3 years ago. We had to switch to all digital (which was a pain because we still have an analog TiVo).
Anyway, this isn’t new and they weren’t intentionally waiting. My guess is that they simply can’t do the entire country at once.
The simplest answer is that a HD video stream downconverted to SD for analog output to a 480i set isn’t going to look as good as the original SD video stream displayed natively, ESPECIALLY if the original content was SD. Lots of artifacts, the whole stretch/squeeze thing to to 4:3 to 16:9 to 4:3 will look terrible, depending on how it was done you may wind up with black bars on all 4 sides of the picture. They’re compressing the holy hell out of the SD channels anyway, so they may not want to deal with the complaints involved in cutting them & doing what you said.
Plus, I’m not sure, but I believe the chips in the cheapo DTA boxes can’t actually decode an HD stream.
I’m surprised more cable companies aren’t doing this. The local Time Warner system still carries about 60 analog NTSC channels on the old VHF broadcast and CEA channels, and they still carry … oh, maybe 60 more low-def channels in the digital tier, along with low-def versions of premium and pay-per-view channels. Many of the low-def channels in the digital tier have high-def equivalents. The cable box for my living room set can downconvert to low-def NTSC, so it seems pointless to carry both low-def and high-def versions of channels above the basic tier.
On my bedroom television (a smaller HDTV set), with cable box, there’s very few high-def channels or QAM stations. All of the QAM channels are low-def.
The only advantage I see to the low-def channels is that their programs take up less space on a DVR. It’s as if the DVR uses an ancient 80 gig hard drive; after more than 20 hours or so of HD programming, it’s full.
Also, aren’t there some channels that simply don’t exist in HD? Is C-SPAN HD available nationwide? Does TVG-HD or Nicktoons-HD (not to be confused with Nickelodeon-HD) even exist?
Back in 2009 during the DTV cutover, cable companies were trying to get new customers by advertising something like “You don’t have to buy a new TV! No confusing and unsightly converter boxes! Just plug cable into your existing TV and keep watching! Switch to cable today!”
So they basically had to keep the analog signals around for a while until memories faded and until the number of VCR users became negligible.
Downconverting a video feed takes quite a bit more processing power than simply decrypting a video feed and converting it to analog.
While it would easily fit in the dta boxes, the cost for each box would be noticeably higher. And they’d have to eat that cost themselves, since consumers would throw a fit about paying more for no additional benefit and, as others have suggested, likely lower service quality.
Correct me if I’m wrong.
I thought that the mandates change to digital implied that the pictures delivered would be in 1be HD.6:9 aspect ratio and therefore
I loved that Cablevision had some smarts in their boxes in that if you had a 16:9 TV that selecting either the “SD” or “HD” channel of a particular provider still got you the HD picture. You could not ask for the dumbed down 480i signal.
I don’t understand how there are still that many 4:3 sets still in use. For crying out loud, you can get a 26" flat screen for less than $150. You have to be a real Luddite to want to keep your 4:3 set.
Probably not a good one. Most $150.00 TVs probably have TN panels that have shitty 6 bit color and narrow viewing angles. My 32" tube TV works fine for casual viewing when I don’t want to fire up the projector and make a big production.
And there’s a lot of 5 tube AM radios around too.
Some people have answered the question (right now it would cost too much / look bad) but other people aren’t understanding the question or how cable works.
In some cases there were up three different feeds of a channel, a high definition digital feed, a standard definition digital feed, and an analog standard definition feed. Most of the analogs have gone away, and now all the rest of them are so Comcast will be 100% digital soon.
My question was: since all customers will now need a box no matter what, why even have a high def and standard def digital versions of each channel when you could just send out a high def version for everyone and use the customer’s box to downconvert it if they don’t pay for HD or have an HD set. Sending out a SD digital channel doesn’t take nearly the bandwidth of a SD analog or HD digital, but it’s not zero, so I was thinking the bandwidth could be used for something more useful.
FWIW, My high def box downcoverts for my tube TV when it’s not driving the projector, and it does look decent to me.
“My old CRT television is just fine” is the new “I don’t watch television”. You’ll see a lot of posts on the Dope from those who aren’t letting go of their glass teats.
There’s still a massive base of CRT televisions in hospitality and institutional settings - hotels, motels, hospitals, nursing homes, and prisons. Even when hotels have new LCD sets, they’re usually provided with an analog NTSC feed. 4:3 stretched on a locked hospitality model flat screen is not a enjoyable experience. I’ve never stayed at a hotel with 16:9 LCD televisions receiving HD digital feeds.
I just looked up the specs for one common model DTA, and it can’t decode HD video at all. So if the cable companies got rid of all SD channels, they’d have to replace all non-HD capable DTAs, which presumably isn’t cost effective for them.