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I know that I may not get many answers to this question.
I have BASIC LIMITED service and I can get all the basic HDTV channels already.
My wife just came home with a load of boxes from COMCAST.
What do I get for hooking up an extra DTV decoder in front of the HDTV besides having to deal with another remote??
Follow Ups:
The started to block all the QAM clear channels except the locals. They wanted me to get a digital box which I had no room for.
I dropped my service.
Jack
I am ready to drop my service as well.
It is just a matter as to whether their service is worth $55.00 a month.
And, of course, the extra box, who want's that??
I always thought their service was good and to have a clear cable channel so you didn't need an antenna. But now, this is just extortion, pure and simple!
Have enough remotes and boxes in your life? Cable providers don't think so. IMO, a great mistake for them: They should have provided some other means of encrypting, like a password encoded card or something, but NOT another box.
There used to be another option-a cable card. TVs made in the mid to late 2000s had that option. It was a card that fit into a slot to be used instead of a box. Downside? It was one way, no VOD. Cable companies hated them. When I had comcast, I asked them to use a cable card. They (sort of) tried twice, but couldn't get them to work. I gave up. I don't know if TVs even come with that option any more.
Now I use an antenna in my attic.
Jack
If you only have Basic or Expanded Basic, your television can tune to these channels. They also send the free OTA channels (Over The Air SD and HD), down the pipe so you don't need a box for those channels either.
What your television can't do is order Pay-Per-View. That's where the box comes in...
NOTHING! What is it good for?? -- someone link to the youtube for this, please!So I need another remote and another little box that has to be displayed in order for the remote to see it!
Thanks a LOT for NOTHING!
Edits: 07/20/13
All these boxes are SD resolution, so fat chance I'll be using them.
Can't get them initialized even. Several calls to Comcast.
Still don't know why they seemed to want to give them to me?
Seems like a COLLOSAL waste to me. My wife picked them up -- they keep telling her we need them ;-)
Cable boxes are the checked baggage of the Cable industry. The monthly rentals generate a lot of the revenue and MOST of the profits of a typical cable company. The more they can get you to pay a monthly charge for the better.
There is a move on the part of cable companies to remove all unscrambled channels from the raw cable, thus requiring everyone to rent a box no matter what. They got Congress to go along with the consumer scam by spending billions on lobbying.
The publis is only now discovering that they can get excellent HDTV signals with nothing more than simple rabbit ears. Supplement that with a low cost Netflix or Hulu subscription, and people are cutting their cable services right and left.
THe cable industry is rapidly losing out to other sources that are cheaper and offer HD pictures without the rental box costs and hassle. THe box rentals to a certain degree have kept the revenue stream going as more and more people discover they can live without basic cable. The cable industry fails to realize it, but even now they are on the verge of being obsolute. Stay tuned. It will get messier before it is all over.
The changes are just starting. THe cable industry and their set top boxes is much like the phone industry of 50 years ago. Remember when the only place you could get a telephone was from the phone company and you had to pay an extra $2 a month to get the phone. Of course you couldn't use your phone line without one of the phone company telephones and paying the rent.
Back in the good old Ma Bell daze, the phones worked flawlessly 99% of the time. And when there was a problem, they dispatched a guy who came out and fixed the problem. None of this "Is the problem inside the house or outside the house?" nonsense. Hell, I don't know *where* the problem is located, I just know it's a problem - now fix it!!
De-regulation sounded like a good idea way hack when, I'm not so sure now...
-RW-
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