Can the cable company tell how many TV's I have connected?

Factual Questions
21

That’s nice, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the question at hand.

22

a question was raised about the leagality issue

23

Yes, but your link does not address it. It deals with signal bleed, which is leakage of signal, either through the air or through the lines, which cause a subscriber to be able to view content for which he has not paid or does not wish to receive. It has nothing to do with in-home splits, authorized or not.

24

showing my complete ignorance here as I dont have cable.

  1. Splitting the cable before the cable box. Would that be any good as you would need another cable box - aren’t the signals encrypted to stop this?. If it isnt I can see the cable companies getting annoyed if someone taps in for free.

  2. Splitting the signal after the cable box. This can be done simply nowdays with a wireless box but of course everyone in the house has to watch “Monster Trucks” when you do. I cant see the cable companies worrying about this as it is impossible to detect without going into the house and doesn’t affect anyother cable users on the same line.

25

Most cable companies only require you to have a cable box to receive scrambled channels or Pay Per View. If you just want to watch TV through your cable ready set, you can split it before the box. Of course you may not have a box at all—a lot of our customers don’t have one, because they only subscribe to basic service and don’t need one.

26

I called my cable company to have a line run to my daughter’s room. They told me I should get a splitter and do it myself so that I wouldn’t have the installation fee. They don’t charge for extra lines. 1 TV or 5, it’s all the same to them.

27

I work for a cable company as well, and set up all sorts of cable installations. I also troubleshoot existing installations. The company that I work for does not care how many times you split the cable once it is in your home. If you feel the need to send that signal to 50 tvs in your home, go for it. Now, there will be considerable degredation of signal, and we do recommend that you add a signal amplifier if you hook up more than four tvs.

If one of our installers goes to your home and notices that you have more tvs hooked up than we have a record of, that is fine. The only time there would be any additional charge for these extra televisions is if we need to repair any faulty cable work that the customer installed themselves. This would be a one time charge only, not an additional monthly charge.

Cable theft is when a customer has cable service hooked up to their home or residence when they are not paying for any cable service at all. Once a customer pays for our service and we connect a cable to their home, they may do with it as they please, splitting cable and running wires to their heart’s content.