Text 12973, 67 rader
Skriven 2008-03-15 15:26:37 av Jeff Bowman (1:229/500)
  Kommentar till text 12888 av Björn Forsström (2:203/614.61)
Ärende: Atlanta Tornado, Cable Companies
========================================
BF> For "news", anything is better than Fox but right now they showed that
BF> Atlanta Georgia was hit by a hurricane, local time 10 pm I guess because
BF> we're 11 or 12 hours ahead of you so here it's 10 in the morning.
 
I actually just found out about that hurricane on CNN's site this morning.
Seems like it did quite a lot of damage, since it came right into the city,
which isn't very common.  It pancaked one four-story building, seems to have
possibly done some damage to the Georgia Dome (which people were inside at the
time for a basketball game), broke out tons of glass, tore up homes, and turned
some buildings into virtual rivers by the look of their staircases.  I dunno
how much damage it is altogether yet, but it may end up being considered a
disaster area.
 
We seem to have gotten the tail end of the storm this afternoon a little
farther up north where I am, with lots of rain and a little thunder/lightning,
but nothing that bad luckily.
 
 
BF> I think USA is the only country with so much cable. In most other
BF> countries it's either sattelite or with a usual antenna.
 
America is going to force switch everyone from analog television broadcasting
to digital signals in 2009, so the people who do still use antenna here are
going to be screwed unless they upgrade the TV, buy a converter box, or switch
to cable/satellite.  We have a couple of small portable televisions we use on
certain occasions which will become useless after this, unfortunately.  On the
bright side, the government is offering vouchers towards getting converter
boxes cheaper, which we sent off for.
 
While I don't entirely disapprove of the switch, I do disapprove of how some
cable companies are using this as reason to trick analog cable users into
upgrading to digital cable.  My own cable provider has removed certain channels
who changed their network feeds to fully digital, only providing them through
their digital cable service and/or if you get their set-top box (which costs a
monthly fee for each box).  The cable company could just convert the channel
back into analog on their side, and pipe it through to the customers like
always, but they won't.
 
I contacted my cable company about it, since I had a pretty good idea that the
only reasons they weren't still giving us the channels was for monetary ones;
they can pack more channels into the stream if they're digital than if they're
analog, and they don't have to run any extra equipment to do the digital to
analog conversion.
 
After trying to talk to someone who had no idea what they were talking about,
and who was giving me countless wrong answers and misdirections one after the
next (including entirely blaming the 2009 switch on them "having" to do this),
I finally got a response from a lady higher up. She finally explained why they
were really removing those channels from the analog cable line-up, and while it
involved lots of "for the customer's benefit" lines, she did explain the
differences in bandwidth between the two types of cable channels and how they
could offer more by making them digital.  Which confirmed my initial
assumptions that it was mostly just about them saving some bandwidth/money.
 
If more money wasn't a motivation for them, they'd continue to offer analog
cable to all customers even after the switch, like they do right now.  I
personally don't care enough to want digital cable.  Nor do I want to pay extra
a month for a box for every television in the house, not to mention the fact
that my computer has a TV tuner in it as well, which would completely mess up
its functionality (couldn't change channels via the computer, etc).
 
It's all just really aggravating to be forced to pay for things I don't need
just because somebody decided they could make more money by doing everything
differently.

--- D'Bridge 2.99
 * Origin: FyBBS (1:229/500)