For a few decades now, cable-company-provided “antenna service” has been a win for cheapskate consumers like my wife and me. While it only gave you the same channels you could get with a pair of rabbit ears, it gave them to you with near-perfect reception; the feeds were not subject to weather, distance and impediments the way the broadcast signals were. But now that broadcasters have gone digital, you no longer need a perfect signal to get a perfect picture. Without getting into the science too deeply, digital broadcasting gives you HD plus error correction information that enables your TV to “guess” about the periodic micro-fragments of the broadcast that it may miss.
The non-techie bottom line is that unless you can’t live without cable channels or your house is more than 70 miles from the nearest receivable TV tower, you probably don’t need cable anymore…
Up until late October / early November, we enjoyed all the benefits of HD on the major networks from our cable-company-provided super-basic antenna service. This worked because we don’t have any cable boxes and our main TV is equipped with a digital tuner. As always, Comcast took the feed straight from our local stations and sent it along to us, and the magic that is digital broadcasting took care of the rest.
However, by the second week in November, I realized that we were no longer getting HD feeds anymore. To be specific: none of the prime time broadcasts from the major networks–which we had previously received in HD–were coming over the cable in HD anymore. They were being “pulled down” to standard definition and letterboxed so that the picture was still at the HD size ratio of 16:9, but within an old-school 4:3 picture broadcast at 480i. One random channel in the upper 70s was still coming over as HD, so I knew that the problem wasn’t a defect in our TV.
What followed were three or four really insulting calls with Comcast customer service, in which various company reps tried to convince me that:
- My TV was never showing HD before
- I needed to get a cable box for HD to work
- I needed to upgrade my service
I finally got connected to a technical support rep who seemed to be able to think outside the confines of a customer support call flowchart. He explained that before late October, Comcast had been broadcasting both digital and analog to support customers who hadn’t yet gotten digital receivers. Now, they only broadcast in digital–but they also pull down all of the feeds for channels 2 to 22 to standard definition “to continue to support customers with older equipment”. Huh?
The bottom line was that while Comcast seems to have every intention of returning to the model where “antenna service” customers get unmodified feeds from the major networks, they won’t be going back to that for three years. You know–to support those customers with older hardware. And if those of us who had no trouble getting the HD signals before now decide to upgrade our service plans to get HD back, so much the better, yes?
I strongly suspect that Comcast may be on the wrong side of the FCC on this one. I bet that if I got some legal representation, and chased this around the courts for several years, I might even be able to prove it. But since I don’t have the financial backing to mount this sort of attack, I’m going to take a subtler, more consumer-oriented approach. After the holidays, when my wife has gotten her fix of whatever Christmas-themed programming our cable-bound TV picks up, I’m buying an antenna.
Admittedly, it would have been harder back when Comcast was my internet provider, but right now, Comcast is just a cable company to me, and not a very honest one. Of course, Comcast’s message to me is pretty clear, too–they have gone out of their way to make their cheapest service into a lower quality product than what I can get for free. That math doesn’t do it for me any more.
Ironically, when we resided the house a few years back, we had the roof-mounted TV antenna removed. Soon we’ll be putting an antenna back and ditching the cable line, instead.
Do you have the option of doing a non-roof mounted antenna, like on a tower outside the house or something? I am curious as to whether a roof- or side-mounted antenna is a value decrementer these days. Or, I’m out in left field.
That’s an interesting question. But if they’re gigging properties for antennas, hopefully they’re gigging houses with dishes, too
As it happens, a look at http://www.antennaweb.org/ tells me that I may want an omni-directional antenna for our location. These sorts of antennas don’t look anything like the Old-Skool directional antennas; they look more like something Raytheon would put on a PT boat – http://www.crutchfield.com/p_209FDTVO/Terk-FDTVO.html?search=Terk+VENDORID209&ssi=0&searchdisplay=Terk&tp=3261