Open letter to Question House concerning cable TV

[leeeah]

The cable guy just came by and installed digital.  Here is a letter I wrote to my household to let them know of the inconvenience this progress will bring us.  Anyone else out there dealing with this issue?

Comments

[rojonoir]

You might look into getting an antenna - the digital signal should actually be better quality than the recompressed comcast digital. You'll get fewer channels, but hulu/netflix/etc. is probably a fine option for the rest.

[leeeah]

That kind of blows my mind, actually. I think of antennas as those temperamental things you have to fiddle with constantly to get to work and can't stand in certain parts of the room if you want the signal to come through. The thought that an antenna might be better than the cable...wow!

[rojonoir]

With digital, it's practically all or nothing. If you can get the signal at all, you get a perfect picture. Also, with cable, the cable company recompresses video to fit more channels in the same pipe, but with an antenna, each station has an allotted bandwidth and they have an incentive to use it.

I haven't tried it myself, but you can geek out with this site to figure exactly what sort of antenna you need for your address and how to aim it:
http://www.antennaweb.org/aw/welcome.aspx

[dissimilus]

yep. I posted about this several months ago. The big problem is that anything you own that doesn't have a digital tuner will be basically useless, like my series 2 tivo

[mediaboy]

We dumped cable 5 months ago and haven't missed it in the slightest. Hulu, DVD, antenna. No need for anything else. Put an antenna on your roof if you need to get a signal to a bunch of TVs in the house.