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Anyone have Digital Cable?

M

Madcowz

Platinum Member
I'm thinking of upgrading to InteractiveOptimum Digital Cable. I'd be paying $79.99/month + box/remote rental, etc (silver which is damn high, but I'd be getting a lot of good movie channels at that price; about 27 total including HBO on demand which sounds awesome (lets you choose from 150 of the latest HBO movies and shows each week. And you can start, pause, rewind and fast-forward at any time). Plus, I high the picture quality is a lot better than standard cable, and they offer free HDTV signals if I ever upgrade my TV to HDTV. I'm just concerned about extra unknown fee's... do you have to pay for extra TV sets? Do you need the digital cable box for each additional TV?
 
A friend of mine has Cox Digital Cable. Channel switching is pretty slow (1-2 seconds or so).. Quality is good, though. Your cable company can answer most of your questions (fees, etc).
 
Originally posted by: Moralpanic
do you have to pay for extra TV sets? Do you need the digital cable box for each additional TV?
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Yes
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Yes if you want the "digital" channels and such, but no in that you would get all the basic cable channels for the tvs w/o the box.
 
A bunch of my friends have it, and IMO it isn't worth it. It does not look any better than regular cable to me. It takes 1-2 seconds to flip through channels, and maybe 1/2 a second to browse through the channel guide (tells you whats on the other channels without changing to them). So if you're a quick channel flipper, it's horrible! The other problem is that the browser lists all 900 channels, but you only get maybe 200 of them. And they're spread all around in that 900 channel range! It doesn't go 1-200, it goes 1-95, 230-300, 400-405, 556-587, etc. But you literally have to flip through all these empty channels that you can't get just to get to the ones that you do have!

Sorry for the ranting, btw.
 
I have Charter digital cable and when I use s-video it looks a LOT better than standard cable.

You need 1 cable box per TV. I love ESPNews and the movie channels, especially since I have a ReplayTV now.
 
I have TW Digita Cable, in Queens, NY. I love their service. I have the "Its All Here" Package, which includes:
Basic + Standard + DTV with all 6 multichannel premiums, All Premium Services On Demand on 3 Sets, plus RoadRunner... for $122.00/month. ( I live in an Apartment Complex, so there's a negotiated pricing discount)..

A friend of mine lives on LongIsland and has iO Gold... and they do get some premium channels that I dont (24 on Demand, Fox on Demand) and it took TW almost 4 years to get Fx (take that YES!).

If i had a choice... i would prefer my DTv service 🙂

 
Originally posted by: guyver01
I have TW Digita Cable, in Queens, NY. I love their service. I have the "Its All Here" Package, which includes:
Basic + Standard + DTV with all 6 multichannel premiums, All Premium Services On Demand on 3 Sets, plus RoadRunner... for $122.00/month. ( I live in an Apartment Complex, so there's a negotiated pricing discount)..
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I have the same service in manhattan (my bill is around $125 a month for one set and road runner cable modem, I think). The premium on demand channels (ie, HBO, SHO, MAX, TMC) are pretty cool but they don't offer too many selections (maybe 20-30 each at any one time). I hope they will add more movies/shows in the future.

Also, at least with Time Warner cable, there is NO delay between flipping channels.
 
We used to have all possible channels offered by charter last year. Their platinum or gold package I think. Anyway I don't think it is worth it at all. All the movies on HBO are old or rerun. They showed x-men like million times over and over. Its same with all other pay channels too. Cinemax is a little better but none of them are worth the money you have to pay for them.

As far as digital picture quality goes well yes the quality is good but you might have to consider how much TV do you watch and how much will you have to pay for it. I hardly watch 2 hours per week since everybody decided to go with the Reality cr@p TV.
 
I have Knology cable. I have broadband, my telephone, and digital cable with all HBO channels, SHowtime, and Cinemax for $110 a month.
 
I had digital cable from Insight (was AT&T).

It suffers from the same problems DirecTV and Dish do: Over compression.

The picture is free from anolog defects (static, ghosting, etc.) only to be filled with digital artifacts. Not only that, but the color looks 16 bit rather than 32 bit. Color banding abounds.

Just remember that cable went digital (only on channels over 100) to increase bandwidth by compression. NOT to improve picture quality.

It's amazing to compare overly compressed digital cable and DirecTV standard definition broadcasts with the OTA (over the air) digital SD broadcasts I get from two of my local stations off my antenna. The locals use MUCH less compression, and the images are beautiful for SD.

And the compression trend only gets worse with time, not better. DirecTV's picture quality used to be as good as my OTA locals. Now it ranges from not quite as bad, to in some cases worse than digital cable. The more "local stations" DirecTV adds, the more they compress the other content. Digital cable is guilty of this as well as they add more standard, PPV, and indemand channels.

There is going to be a backlash soon, because more and more people are buying larger HD and SD TVs that highlight the horrible picture quality that comes from overly compressing digital channels.

I would gladly give up 30% + of the available channels on DirecTV or cable to increase picture quality. Hell, I'd give up 60% to have all HD.
 
Originally posted by: toant103
don't you need a HDTV with the decoder to get the real digital signal?
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HDTV and digital cable are NOT the same thing. The first is a screen resolution that is broadcast with digital signals. The second is merely a broadcast medium. You can broadcast any resolution digitaly.

It always cracks me up when cable employees make this mistake and claim digital cable and HDTV are one in the same.
 
Big improvement for me when I switched.

MY Experience:

Better picture over ch 1-100.
Ch 101 -160 have some great science, automotive and aeronautical programs on. Didnt get before.
Movie channels picture as good as DirecTV (afterI added a cable amp)
Sound quality not as good as DTV
Slow switching but not bad.
Many more channels.
Great channel guide and ifo available
Great remote
Pain hooking up VCR to record second channel
Box for each set.

Adelphia

Only went to it when DTV dropped their DSL and Adelphia BB was the only thing I could get except for BLS + the cost of a second phone line. Good bundled package price and no contract so to this point I am satisfied

Cable employees knowledge for the most part is NON EXISTANT on digital products
 
man you guys pay alot. i've got digital cable (Time Warner, Ithaca NY) w/ 26 premium channels and iControl (TWC's version of TIVO) for only $46 a month.

i think it's great. go for it.
 
I had Charter Digital Cable for a few months. At first it was a HUGE jump in quality. The only problem was that most of the channels we usually watched were still in the non-digital portion from channels 1 to 100. It WAS a great deal financially since I got it plus a discount on my cable internet (which I'd already had.) Plus, I didn't have to pay for extra units like you would with satellite if you didn't want digital cable on all your TVs since you still get regular cable, which was fine for us since we do our main TV watching in the den. But after a couple weeks, the quality on our digital channels began to degrade TREMENDOUSLY. We'd be watching a show and the compression jpegging would be HORRIBLE. The picture would completely freeze for seconds (sometimes minutes) at a time. After a few weeks of this we said screw it and went to Dish Network. Now we've got digital on EVERY channel and it's only been out twice due to major storms (and even then only for a few minutes.) Plus, I got a 60-hr PVR for only $75 which has totally changed my TV viewing world. I still actually receive my regular expanded basic cable since I still get Charter Pipeline - they just don't tell you that that IS an option. So I still use cable on my TV in my office since I don't want to have to pay for an extra receiver box on a 13" TV that I only watch regular channels on anyway.
 
Originally posted by: Triumph
A bunch of my friends have it, and IMO it isn't worth it. It does not look any better than regular cable to me. It takes 1-2 seconds to flip through channels, and maybe 1/2 a second to browse through the channel guide (tells you whats on the other channels without changing to them). So if you're a quick channel flipper, it's horrible! The other problem is that the browser lists all 900 channels, but you only get maybe 200 of them. And they're spread all around in that 900 channel range! It doesn't go 1-200, it goes 1-95, 230-300, 400-405, 556-587, etc. But you literally have to flip through all these empty channels that you can't get just to get to the ones that you do have!

Sorry for the ranting, btw.
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I completely agree with everything above.

My Comcast Digital Cable doesn't look any better than analog. Actually analog looks *better* b/c of less compression due to less channels. Digital also has annoyingly slower channel flipping--toooo slow, thus I have to use the TV Guide to scan faster--but the pleaseure of channel surfing is gone! :disgust: I originally wanted analog when moving into apt. but ATT (back then) charged *more* for analog than digital. WTF?! So I got the Silver digital package at $69. Then this January, the new owners(Comcast) raised my service to $76 per month. They're giving me $10 off/month for 1 year for me to stay when I threatened to leave (there's a thread on AT about this). But after this $10 off promo thing ends, they'll raise my rate to $79. What BS!

I'll switch to satellite soon, but I heard it's no better and even worse pic quality than cable due to compression, but at least i'll be *cheaper* than Comcast. Anything digital, whether cable or Satellite, is compressed, so you *can* see the blocky digital artifacts when you get closer to the TV. Compression is due to all the channels being squeezed thru the pipe. Not enough bandwidth=Compression

Cable was so much better 20 years ago! Today, it's a POS!!
rolleye.gif
 
Originally posted by: theNEOone
man you guys pay alot. i've got digital cable (Time Warner, Ithaca NY) w/ 26 premium channels and iControl (TWC's version of TIVO) for only $46 a month.
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yeah, but you live in ithaca!
I bet you rent for a studio apartment in ithaca also ain't $1900 a month...

 
Originally posted by: Amused

There is going to be a backlash soon, because more and more people are buying larger HD and SD TVs that highlight the horrible picture quality that comes from overly compressing digital channels.

I would gladly give up 30% + of the available channels on DirecTV or cable to increase picture quality. Hell, I'd give up 60% to have all HD.
Click to expand...


I completely agree! Let's start a revolution!
 
I have time warner and I get digital cable. It's not bad. My box has s-video and coaxial, and I like to watch certain shows in DD 5.1. It's worth it to me.

Oh, and I really like Music Choice digital music channels
 
Originally posted by: Hector13
Originally posted by: theNEOone man you guys pay alot. i've got digital cable (Time Warner, Ithaca NY) w/ 26 premium channels and iControl (TWC's version of TIVO) for only $46 a month.
Click to expand...
yeah, but you live in ithaca! I bet you rent for a studio apartment in ithaca also ain't $1900 a month...
Click to expand...

My price shown above is with digital cable, my cable modem service/rental fee, and phone service.
 
I've had digital cable in the past and had the same horrible slow channel changing. It was so bad that I got an A/B switch and rigged it to where I could watch the analog channels (1-100) through the TV tuner, since I rarely watched the crappy channels above 100 anyway. I hated that.

Does Dish/DirecTV have slow channel-changing too?
 
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