The FCC requirement is only to carry the locals in analog until 3 years after the switchover. A half a dozen analog channels doesn't account for 70% of their bandwidth. Most of these cable operators have upward of 60 channels still on analog and that is a huge bandwidth hog that they CAN do something about without having to resort to SDV.
They do SDV because most analog only cable rates are a crime against humanity and are a revenue stream they don't want to upset and they know the people the do upset with SDV are a very small minority. Believe me TWC and Cox are probably thinking to themselves "Suckers, $40k is nothing compared to the subscriber loss we would suffer if we dropped all analogs except the locals."
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
bull3964 @ Oct 16th 2008 5:09PM
The FCC requirement is only to carry the locals in analog until 3 years after the switchover. A half a dozen analog channels doesn't account for 70% of their bandwidth. Most of these cable operators have upward of 60 channels still on analog and that is a huge bandwidth hog that they CAN do something about without having to resort to SDV.
They do SDV because most analog only cable rates are a crime against humanity and are a revenue stream they don't want to upset and they know the people the do upset with SDV are a very small minority. Believe me TWC and Cox are probably thinking to themselves "Suckers, $40k is nothing compared to the subscriber loss we would suffer if we dropped all analogs except the locals."