Forewarned that setting up my two non-cabled analog televisions to receive digital signals will be "fiddly" and probably doomed, I've now got the converter instructions spread out in my kitchen, only to learn they presume that I either have a large outdoor antenna or cable service to the room.
If I had cable service to the room, I wouldn't need a converter, would I? (It also says that trying to sync the remote with the TV should be abandoned "after 150 trials" - must have been written by someone with hugely more patience than I have).
All this brings me back to two abiding irritants: the national FCC giveaway to the big media companies and our local thralldom to Time-Warner.
The FCC giveaway probably doesn't qualify as a local issue for OP purposes, although the general loss of media local-ness is pertinent and - to put it mildly - regrettable. Our relation to Time-Warner is definitely local, since - at least in theory - the contract with them was locally considered, approved, and re-approved (?).
We have basic digital service (i.e., not HBO or other premium channels) to two rooms plus internet, and our son "treated us" (he paid for upgrade, we pay monthly fee) to DVR service in one of the rooms. I'm too embarrassed to say just how exorbitantly expensive all that is, but any client of Carrboro-Chapel Hill Time-Warner Cable knows how much it has gone up in the last decade, not to mention how much it's gone up since the first local contract was approved.
As many people like to remind us, we do have alternatives: satellite TV service and DSL for the computer. We are surrounded by very tall, signal-obstructing trees; and DSL still isn't as fast as cable. Moreover - not a small point given our weather history - it seems prudent to have more than one form of communication with the outside world. Our landline phone was the only thing that worked through hurricanes and ice storm; but we seem to lose it on other, random occasions, and I'd prefer not to lose both internet and phone service at the same time.
It's a complicated world, but bowing to the pressure to bundle all services into one is both imprudent and - as T-W consistently demonstrates - not always economical once monopoly creeps in. Once we have full switch-over to digital, I suspect the reputedly lousy digital broadcast reception could finally drive the last non-satellite holdouts to get cable. (And wasn't that part of the plan?)
Which brings me to my question for the day: can someone explain to me where we (as in OC/C/CH governments and citizenry) now stand with respect to Time Warner? Have we relinquished all say in what they provide us and how much they charge? Is it utterly beyond feasibility at this point to even consider seeking some sort of competition for service to the area? What were the original terms of the agreement - once the cable lines were in, did we become wedded to T-W Cable in perpetuity?
Comments? History? Information?
Issues:
Comments
TC not happy w/ TW
I can't comment on the history of how we got into this mess, but at Monday's Town Council Meeting, members were vocal about their dissatisfaction w/ TW, and looking forward to competition from AT&T sometime next year. In the meantime, Council members requested an update on how TW is dealing with customer complaints, which seem to be on the rise. I think you can find video of the meeting here:
http://chapelhill.granicus.com/ViewPublisher.php?view_id=3
I should say I neither have cable nor live in city limits, but the conversation was both humorous and eye-opening.
The Digital Storm
This is a joke and another industry give-away. I saw a great editorial criticizing PBS for putting Moyers on at 11:00 PM (National PBS slot is 9 PM). Our "local" PBS covers the entire state and puts the documentary program Point of View on at 2 AM Sunday morning (I think, we PVR it).As for the Digital switch, it truly is designed to sell new TVs to people who don't need them. By the way, you can get a decent signal with a converter box and a very cheap UHF antenna. It is another myth that you need a massive outdoor antenna. The little Round thing that attaches to your rabbit ears works okay. This is an industry grab to generate sales of their crappy LCDs and Plasma screens.When the sum total of "local content" is "news" from national feeds about a building demolition in nowhere, Texas, waterskiing squirrels and grainy videotape from proud parents of their 5 year olds flag football game, the whole idea of local anything has jumped the shark. With one million people unable to get help buying the $60 converter boxes that means that a lot of folks will no longer have any TV. When you consider that most of these folks are elderly with little connection to the outside, it makes you wonder how the warnings will be issued for the next Katrina or threat. While that is more of a national issue, it begs the question of protecting our most vulnerable citizens who will have to chose on Feb 17 between their heating bill or the converter box, because some executive needs a new Mercedes.
We should do the digital TV revolution -- here's why
As the electrical engineer on the town council who became the lead person on the 1996 refranchising negotiations with Time Warner Cable, I'll try to answer the questions. First, with regard to the switch to digital TV. It has to happen sometime because the advantages of digital TV over analog TV are far too great to ignore, in terms of picturequality, quadrupling of the number of channels, and all the communications services thatcan and hopefully will be offered down the coax cable that enters our homes. In the last ten years, digital electronics and memory have finally become fast enough that a 1000x1000-pixel display can be captured, processed, transmitted, received and displayed in actual time, i.e., one-sixtieth of a second. We've now seen the digital conversion in computer displays, in music, in video, and in telephony -- yes phone calls, landline and cell, are all digital. The transmission of digital signals, via cable and air, works better with less interference and increased quality, especially to remote sites, much like FM is better than AM radio. Computers, television, telephone, and the internet will continue to mrege to offer communications services we can't imagine today. But we need the pipeline, i.e., the electronic infrastructure, which is the digital transmission format. In the early 1970s, when color TV was introduced, a huge compromise was made in the color TV format so that images in that format could be received and displayed on existing black-and-white TV sets. The result in the U.S. is a medium-quality color signal that we have watched for 35 years and that now completely fills the available channel space. The compromise in the design of the digital format to make digital TV backwards-compatible with existing color TV sets was simply way too great. I don't agree with FCC chair Kevin Martin very often, but I do here. This conversion has been well advertised, made financially feasible with converter boxes funded by the federal government (though late reports indicate a shortage of coupons), and trial conversions (e.g., Wilmington, NC) have been successful. The state of Hawaii is switching starting today, I think. The cost of digital TV sets will tumble as their functions increase, just as has happened with computers. With regard to the TWC franchise in Chapel Hill and most of the triangle area: In 1996 the first franchise in CH expired and the town negotiated with TWC for an extension. The big issue then was, by far, the removal of the rented converter boxes that were required and were technically unnecessary if TWC would not transmit their signals in a scrambled format. We successfully negotiated that, so that converter boxes are not needed for levels of service up through CNN and ESPN, i.e., about 75 channels. TWC was having a huge theft-of-signal problem in the region and was very unhappy with the town's position. For almost everything else, the deck was stacked against the town by federal law due to lobbying success in Washington by the telecom companies. As far as competition is concerned, we were stymied there too, but for a different reason. The franchise is non-exclusive, so that in theory, a company could move in to compete. However no bank would loan money to a cable company to do an "overbuild", i.e., to build the cable TV system in a region where there already was one, so that for practical purposes, it might as well be exclusive. There were studies that showed that rates were lower and customer service was better in the few locations where there was competition,but our chance was slim. Chapel Hill is not large enough, about 20K households, with a penetration of about 70 pct. plus perhaps 1000 commercial customersto attract a competitor. For economy of scale, TWC combined CH with Durham at its "headend", the place where they receive their satellite signals and put them onto the cable system. TWC wanted to reserve a number of their channels for telephone services, wanting to be a phone company regulated only by the town under the aegis of very favorable (to them) federal law, and we had to fight to keep them in the TV business. Bell South, now AT&T, is state-regulated with much harsher rules. The new digital TV format provides the best possibility for competition, as the TV, phone, cell, and internet services increasingly merge. Telephone has a major infrastructure advantage over cable TV. Each household in CH has a unique pair of wires that lead from their two switches (one in Timberlyne and one at the corner of Henderson and E. Rosemary). Cable TV is a tree structure, where each household is a leaf on the tree, and there is no direct, unique pathway upstream. The image of the cable TV company being less competent than the phone company has a historic origin. In the 1950s, Community Antenna TV (CATV) companies formed in rural, mountainous areas in Appalachia. The over-the-air reception was poor without a tall antenna, and individual tall antennas were impractical, so CATV companies formed, offered to build an antenna and distribute the signal by wire to the homes. Unfortunately these companies were not very scrupulous and took advantage of uneducated, poor folks. That image has followed the cable TV industry ever since, with some justification. The bottom line, to me at least, is that the digital TV conversion will bring huge advantages in the future, though at some nuisance cost, as Priscilla describes above, and that we should do it.
Re: Joe Capowski's post
Thanks so much for the thorough and detailed history, and discussion - not that we have a choice not to go digital at this point. However, my skepticism presists re: the following:1. There's no way after Feb. 17th for people to get TV broadcasts for free; and the original charter of the FCC included the concept that the public should have access to information for the public good - both public service (e.g., in emergencies) and public forum (to monitor government and hear debaters/candidates). Subsidy of that public utility through commercials has now been inverted to a situation where we now have to pay even to see those commercials, and if any other content is shoe-horned in, it still has to get ratings. That's a broad-brush problem. The local problem is what amounts to a looming black-out of free televised information.2. I'm not particularly beguiled by promises of better image quality as adequate compensation for that loss (especially since my vision seems to get worse about as fast as picture resolution improves).3. See my other post today re: the failure of the technology if the signal is inadequate. For some - not all, of course; and not those who don't watch TV in the first place - this feels like it might resemble a reversion to where we were decades ago in terms of snowy pictures and slippery station signals. 4. I stand by my admonition that bundling all forms of communication in one kind of conduit makes us quite vulnerable - not only to emergencies but to failures in the "grid."Will watch with interest to see what AT&T's entrance into the plot does to the next act.
Unconverted
About TC discussion with T-W: refreshing to hear Mayor Foy refer to sessions with T-W as "a charade," even if it confirmed my fears about recourse against T-W. A question I might have asked, though - just for the exercise - is why we must pay extra for digital service when it's about to be our only option, and which has just seen substantial fee increases (the "digipic" packages went up $4./month).Meanwhile, I have my converter box and powered antenna re-packaged and ready to go back to Radio Shack. Apparently there is minimal signal in the front of my house (where I already have cable) and no signal at the back. It was enlightening to go through the exercise of testing both box and antenna, not to mention going to www.antennaweb.org to find out where station signals come from (compass headings if you want!) and how they'll be identified. In addition, I learned from on-line reviews and comments that - at least as of today, before official switchover - a lot of the digital TVs don't get much better signal than one gets with analog+converter, and will need powered antennae. My belated realization is that we have been corralled into no-free-TV, which is presumably what S. Wells was saying.* An added frustration is that battery-powered digital TVs (for power outages) are scarce and, according to the reviews, also all but useless in many low-signal areas. (*One comment: There are $40 coupons available from the gummint toward purchase of the converter boxes, fwiw.)
Coupons gone and Unconvinced
The coupons are gone with a million person waiting list. The statements about quality are rendered completely moot when the signal breaks up if you walk across the room.And the myth of a speed-smeared LCD being better than an analog tube is just that.As for the extra channels, ABC 11 has a national weather feed, 2 of the 5 UNC TV channels go unused, and I do like watching the Bulls on 50-3, but I am not sure how that adds to my quality of life when I have season tickets.The bottom line is that equating this to the color tv revolutioin (your old set still worked) is simply an invalid argument. The benefits of this technology have not been proven.As a free-market Liberal, I have to say that the mass of people don't buy it. The market has spoken and most people side with Priscilla and me on this. Before anyone even considers calling me a luddite, they should know that I can watch the cameras I installed outside my house (yes I installed cameras to watch the birds) on my PDA, work computer and that I have been with Dish Network since 1999 and Sirius since 2004. I love this stuff. They haven't convinced me. And watching reruns of bad westerns on the "extra channels" isn't enough to convince me either.It's a boondoggle and an unfair, unfunded mandate on individuals during a recession. It's not a question of whether it's needed (it's not). It's not a question of benefit (picture quality, baseball and Gunsmoke reruns are not enough), there aren't many that people care about. It's ultimately a question of public safety and fairness to the already disenfranchised poor.
Why Doth The Heathen Rage?
Why did someone have to bring up Time Warner cable? Am I not doing enough with my eating and exercise habits to shorten my life?Joe, very helpful review. It has been my impression that no one has control over the cable companies anymore and we can continue to experience our cable bill marching happily upward every few months while the quality of TV marches happily downwards.My eternal frustration is paying for 70+ channels (basic service) while only watching 4 or 5. Alas, those 4 or 5 are not local. My TV's, like my cars, are decades old but run happily on cable. All my sons (!) have nothing less that 52" and 300 digital channels. Doesn't faze my spousal finance director.Competition is the answer, if the providers compete, and if you can trust their service. I get DSL from AT&T which was a disaster when I signed up but now works ok. You will have to take my land line phone from my cold dead hands (don't you miss Heston?).Final rant: I don't watch TV/film award ceremonies any more because I don't watch network programs (ok, "Lost" is my shameful weakness), don't subscribe to any premium channels, and wait years, if necessary, for the few films I want to see to hit DVD shelf.I am yours, Time Warner; I count on the kindness of strangers......
TWC
Over the past 13 years i have lived in 7 different locations in Raleigh and Chapel Hill, and in every place, it was a nightmare getting TWC to correctly install cable internet, and the wait times to get disconnection "problems" repaired these days are ridiculous, usually 3-9 days out, and often you get a vague 4-hour Window that you have to be present for them to do anything or they will have to reschedule again for another visit a week later. I switched to DSL last year as soon as I could (There is a $5 a month emergency-only phone connection you can sign up for if you don't have home phone service already) and it is just as fast as TWC connection, without the constant outages and having to deal with completely inept repair visits. Also I will note that 6/7 of those locations were rentals and I could get cable TV if I wanted for free by just hooking a TV up to the cable line coming into the modem or in another room. Yes, of course they have "rampant signal theft" if it works for free by just plugging in your TV. boo hoo.