Does TW Plan to Switch all Analog Channels?

[John L]

Does Time-Warner have plans to change all its Basic Analog lineup and all analog channels and switch them or convert them to all Digital in the future???   I would think this is something they must do around 2006, which would require everyone to get a converter box for their analog TV receiver.

-John L.

[gb4fan92]

I asked this same question on TWC website and their answer was no there are no plans to convert all analog to digital. Too many people have cable ready TV's which do not require a cable box. I personally would love to see them switch all the analog channels to digital. Ain't gonna happen!

[John L]

I almost think they would have to during the sametime OTA analog stations have to shut down and go all digital sometime in 2006.

Perhaps they may not have it set in paper, but I would suspect they would have to in time.  

-John L.

[kjnorman]

While I would love to see this happen, I suspect that they may not switch even before 2006.  From a business perspective, they would not want to alienate their analog customers which I would guess is still their lion share of the market.

Rather, they would wait until digital QAM capable TVs far out number analog cable ready TVs in households.  With that switch only just beginning I would place money (abeit not a lot) that they would dump analog and switch to digital delivery between 2006 and 2010.

By then, I would not care as I would have gone all digital (with Directv) in 2004....

Kerry

[foxeng]

Other than picture clarity, it really doesn't matter how the cableco gets the signal. It can be turned into analog with no problem.

Here in Greensboro, TWC is installing fiber optics to all the stations to feed their system. It is being fed to them digitally. The stations are installing 480i 4:3 DTV encoders (the same kind that is being installed in DTV stations, as  a matter of fact, while I have been waiting for them to finish the fiber install, I have been running the cable encoder as a second stream on the DTV transmitter to check to be sure it is working correctly) and then it is fed via fiber to the cable headend and then converted back to NTSC analog on our analog cable channel (cable channel 10 in our case).

As far as the analog shutdown goes, the FCC doesn't care how the signal gets to a cableco subscribers TV, just as long as it is not received at the headend via a NTSC analog transmitter. When TWC gets all 7 stations here fiber delivered to their headend, my market will be at 50% toward the magic number of 85% for analog shutdown. If the other cableco's in the market either do fiber or pick up the 4:3 stream on the DTV channel, then that 50% goes up.

[borghe]

yes TWC and all other cable co's want to eventually shut off analog channels... each analog channel is approx 10 digital channels or 2 HDTV channels worth of bandwidth.

unfortunately as has been said, most cable co.s bread and butter are customers unintersted in digital cable... these people will likely only switch to digital cable when a) it doesn;t cost them any extra money, and b) when they can hook it up to every TV in their house without a converter box. Pretty much not until QAM256 tuners are installed in TVs and cable cos let people activate them...

Until then I imagine analog cable will be around for quite some time.

And the 2006 date is meaningless... As foxeng has said... cable can retransmit any of their signals in analog... probably even HD... if in the (unlikely) event that 85% are capable of receiving ATSC signals but only 60% are interested in digital cable, the analog shutoff would still happen.