"Jeff Liebermann" wrote in message
...
Comcast is now all digital in the People's Republic of Santa Cruz CA.
Of course Comcast has a new scam. You get up to two "free" DTA boxes:
http://customer.comcast.com/Pages/FAQViewer.aspx?seoid=What-is-a-digital-adapter
for listening to FM and viewing non-HD channels. It was originally
announced that it was "free" for 2 years, but Comcast started adding
$5/month per box to some peoples bills in about June.

One problem is that the DTA box somehow manages to produce worse than
analog quality TV pictures. Digital in, garbage out. I don't know
how they managed it, but the "free" box produces some of the worst
looking pictures I have ever seen since the introduction of color TV.
The Comcast solution is to rent a similar box, that produces HD video,
and amazingly produces decent looking non-HD video for $10/month.
That's $120/year per TV set for what used to be free:
http://bgr.com/2013/10/16/comcast-digital-adapter-criticism/
https://www.google.com/search?q=comcast+dta&tbm=isch
Oddly, both types of DTA boxes use the same digital data for non-HD
stations, so it's not Comcast that's sending garbage video. It's the
DTA box.


I have an old cable ready TV that gets close to 100 of the analog chanels.
Just to see if it would work, I hooked up one of the off the air digital
converter boxes up to the cable an it did not pick up anything. Guess that
lets that out if our area goes to all digital.

A newer TV gets the analog and digital chanels off the cable. Then I have
one of the boxes hooked to the main TV.. If my wife could operate things, I
would go to something like Netflix.

The box does work off the air and I get about 30 chanels off the air with an
antenna out side the house.