metaruss

At some point we will become another victim of Comcast’s digital cable “upgrade” plans. We’ve been an analog cable customer of theirs for about 8 years. The only reason we’ve stuck with them is because they are the only provider that can give us good ol’ NTSC on our coax. That is the only way to have all of our cable programming on more than one TV without paying extra each month for each. In addition to the 3 TVs we also use MythTV for our DVR system, which has 3 NTSC and 2 ATSC/QAM tuners.

We are still getting the analog feed, but last week I finally installed the new digital equipment. Their marketing B.S. is confusing and intentionally misleading, but here is what I have learned from the experience:

“Extended Cable” customers are being migrated to the “Digital Starter” package. You get one standard digital cable box, which comes with their “On Demand” feature, and up to two “Digital Transport Adapters”. They give you the impression that the DTAs are you help make up for the loss of analog service on your other TVs, but this isn’t really true (more on this later). After the migration, you will supposedly be left with your primary local stations and a few other useless cable stations like QVC on analog channels 2-17. The rest are only available as digital QAM channels.

This is where it gets ugly. A subset of our old cable lineup is available as unencrypted QAM256 channels, but the others are all encrypted. Some are flagged as encrypted but are actually clear while the rest are fully encrypted. They also sit on random QAM channels/programs that don’t correspond to how they appear in the lineup on the cable box. Comcast is free to move the channels around and play with the encryption whenever they please because they can just reprogram the cable box and DTAs remotely. This makes using your own QAM tuner frustrating, especially since you can’t receive arbitrary basic cable stations due to encryption (like Discovery Channel in my case).

The DTAs are a joke. Comcast makes sure that the channel lineup is only a tiny subset of the lineup you are paying for. They want you to rent real cable boxes, which makes them no better than DirecTV or U-Verse. The DTA will mainly just tune in your “extra” local digital stations in standard definition, but they do NOT tune in your main local stations. For example, if you have a local broadcaster on channel 10, they transmit high-def over the air on channel 10.1 and also probably broadcast a few extra programs on channel 10.2 and 10.3 or more. The DTA will let you view channel 10.2 and 10.3 on your old NTSC TV, but it won’t tune the main channel 10! Comcast provides those as standard def analog stations, but the DTA can’t tune those and the DTA won’t act as a pass-though when it is off like a VCR would (in fact, you can’t turn DTAs off at all). So to watch channel 10, you need an A/B switch on your antenna to switch between the main cable feed and the output of the DTA. The other stations besides the locals that the DTA will receive are fairly useless (more QVC-like stations, Lifetime, and one or two others I’ve never heard of).

So unsurprisingly, Comcast continues to offer less for more. If they provided basic cable stations on unencrypted channels that would be one thing. The only good news in my eyes is that they offer nothing over what you can get from other communication carriers now. All I have to do is put an antenna on the roof.