@snoofle said:
Once the switch from analog to digital comes along, in this scenario, you'd need the converter box to convert the digital signal in the cable to analog so your TV could deal with it. No problem, lots of folks get the coupons and buy the converters.Now Cablevision decides that they're going to start "converting" (aka encrypting) certain channels now, and more to come, until ALL are "converted", for the purpose of "better serving your needs". Mind you, this isn't switching certain channels to digital in advance; it's encryption. This renders the converter boxes useless, and forces you to buy/lease the cable box for every TV in your home (currently $12/month for the first one and $6/month for each additional box). That means that if you've got 3 TV's, it's an extral $24/month.
Of course, Walmart, etc, won't take the unopened boxes back, even with a receipt, because they were "bought with government coupons". As such, anyone who bought into this fiasco is now stuck with converter boxes that they have no way of using, and forced to get cable boxes that they don't really need.
As has been said a few times, cable is 100% unaffected by this change. It is only for over the air broadcasts.
@vt_mruhlin said:
So um, silly question here but doesn't satellite not only force you to have a box in every room, but to have a separate dish for every room (or the dishes with multiple tuners in them?
Nandurius got it pretty much perfect. Satellite doesn't allow dumb splitters for the mentioned bandwidth reasons, so you need a multiswitch with enough inputs for the number of satellites and polarizations you are tracking and enough outputs for your number of tuners. On Dish Network right now, I have two dishes, but that's only because my local channels in HD are on a satellite so far off from the rest that it's impossible to use a multi-bird dish. Typically there are two polarizations (horizontal and vertical), so a setup like mine would have eight wires from the dishes. Dish has some proprietary "Dish Pro" technology that combines two signals on the same cable (requires high quality RG6 cable) and my 3-way wide dish has an internal 4x3 switch that gives it a spare input so I actually only have three wires coming off the dish, each one capable of handling a pair of signals and thus a dual tuner DVR.