See More Clearly Now With Digital Cable TV
As a potential cable subscriber, you are faced with many important decisions. How many rooms should you set up? Should you get the DVR (aka “almost TiVo”) the cable company offers? And perhaps, the most important--should you go with basic or digital cable tv?
The answer lies in your viewing habits and requirements, which, luckily, should be fairly easy to discern. Basic (analog) cable television provides a reasonable amount of programming as well as broadcast television networks (like NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX, etc) and local-access content. Since the selection is much smaller, so is the price tag. Just be careful--basic cable will open just enough of the cable world for you to wonder what else is out there.
And what is out there is digital.
Since the late 1990s, cable companies have been turning to digital signal compression as a way to deliver more channels over the same available bandwidth. Not only do you have more selection, you have a dramatic improvement to picture quality--so you not only have a better idea of what your cable company has to offer, you can see your fantastic selection more clearly and vividly. Unlike analog cable, digital cable requires a special cable box (unless you have a digital cable-ready television and, in that case, have already been swooned by an infinite amount of digital entertainment possibilities).
Chances are the basic cable service your cable company offers is a hybrid of both analog and digital--you get the analog stations (usually those under channel 100), and have the option to view some of the digital content (channels above 100). This allows you to view your basic programming with the option of upgrading or adding some packages. Some companies, like Comcast, have dropped analog broadcasts all together, in favor of an all digital system.
Is digital cable the wave of the future? Yes, but not for reasons listed above. As you may know, on February 17, 2009, as part of the “digital transition” all television stations will be required to broadcast their signal digitally. For those Americans who have only known their local news via antenna, and for those who have only watched television with analog cable, digital cable will prove to be a clear upgrade. Those already on the digital train won’t notice a difference--except they may soon have more people to talk to about the latest series on HBO.