Wow Cable

[mvallevand]

I read a positive post (via the SageTV forums) showing some potential benefits for American NPVR users who subscribe to Wow as their cable provider. It seems their basic tier is going to clear QAM http://www.thewowbuzz.com/blog/technolog...-revisited good news in itself but as a bonuse from the sample there seems to be a lot of multi-rec functionality.

As a Canadian with no clear QAM of note I am jealous.

Martin

[pcostanza]

But many customers correctly pointed out that newer sets with digital QAM tuner capabilities could tune the signals directly if they were unencrypted. This approach would save customers lease fees for DTA equipment, and save WOW! the capital expense of deploying that same equipment in many cases.

In light of customer feedback on this issue, our executive team revisited various issues surrounding the encryption of digital content

Wow (pun intended) imagine a company that is interested in customer feedback!
I'm a monthly Cox 'Town Hall' survey taker. They send me a survey each month and ask me questions and I am extremely vocal and honest. They have actually instituted some of the tiny things we've talked about but I can't see them doing away with boxes though I would think that would still save them lots of money.

Never heard of Wow and think they must be in the smaller markets. I am envious too.

[mikeh49]

Note though that these channels are in SD, 480i. This is discussed in some of the blog comments. Depending on which TV/PC I'm viewing the channel on, Charter's 480i is mediocre, and variable. The local sub-channels tend to be pretty poor, but the "real" cable channels are OK. Still, SDTV looks best on an analog CRT TV, IMO.

Nevertheless, pretty remarkable for a cable company. Charter would never think of this.

[re-Barr]

true that, Mike, Charter's website says that they comply with the FCC mandate to retransmit local affiliates but that they are not required so they don't post channel availability which varies from market to market. Sounds like they wish it would just go away. I think that wow should be applauded for using the clear QAM to broadcast the basic tier. Seems odd though that they would make it SD only... Seems like they could save the bandwidth and cost by doing it HD only.

[mian]

I hope that catches on. Even with just SD, as OP said, multi-rec alone could sell it.

I can't see them doing away with boxes though I would think that would still save them lots of money.

I'm sure as soon Amazon loses kindle DRM, the cable companies will lose their boxes (okay, maybe not that soon). DRM never works, but they keep ramping up investments -- the bigger the failures to preventing theft, the more inconvenience to paying customers, the more convinced they are it's the answer to everything. DRM developers are the evil spawn of the best snake oil salesmen the world ever knew. They're making millions of consumers fund their hocus pocus with absolutely no say in the matter.