[mythtv-users] HDTV reception via Cable

[Steven Adeff]

On 3/8/06, Daniel Kristjansson <danielk at cuymedia.net> wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-03-08 at 22:52 -0500, Steven Adeff wrote:
> > On 3/8/06, Daniel Kristjansson <danielk at cuymedia.net> wrote:
> > > On Wed, 2006-03-08 at 21:25 -0500, Jesse Guardiani wrote:
> > > > I just called Charter Cable and they say you can't tune HD using coax.
> > > > They require a receiver and HDMI, etc. No firewire support either.
> > >
> > > If you are in the USA and are getting HDTV they are required by law
> > > to give you a Firewire capable receiver upon request, which must
> > > provide you with unencrypted access to at least OTA HDTV broadcast
> > > channels.
> >
> > half-true, they are required to give you a cable box with firewire
> > output, but they are not required to send any unencrypted channels via
> > firewire. What they are required to do is send any ANALOG OTA signal
> > over their cable lines unencrypted. HDTV is considered DIGITAL under
> > this law and thus does not fall under the requirement. MOST cable
> > companies will offer the OTA HDTV over their lines unencrypted via QAM
> > and over firewire output without DRM, but they don't have to.
>
> This is probably correct, the summary I read specified OTA, which I
> assumed meant ATSC OTA. But in my actual experience RCN New York only
> broadcasts the primary service of ATSC OTA (of 2-4 services), and
> broadcasts that in a degraded form to what you actually get OTA.

Yea, I spent about an hour trying to find the relevant documents and
another 2 reading through the pdf's. Legal documents don't read well
in PDF, you have to jump back and forth too much. What I found was
that the "free" only applies to analog signals and that HDTV is not
considered analog (even though all signals are technically analog when
broadcast over the air). Their definition of analog and digital are
based on the final decoding stage, since HDTV decodes digitaly in the
final stage it doesn't fall into the Analog part of the law.

The thing is, its more expensive for the cable company to encrypt it,
etc. than to just pick up the signal and send it out over their lines,
so most don't bother since they won't really get anything of it.

--
Steve