.
Thanks for the information you shared, Ted. 

While I do not question anything that you said, the problem still 
lies with the consumer's inability to choose what programs they 
want and what programs they >>do not<< want coming into their homes.

I would gladly pay $1.00 per month for Fox news, but I wouldn't pay 
a plug nickle for CNN or MSNBC.  In fact, I would gladly pay 50-cents 
a month to >>not<< have their hate-America-first politically biased 
garbage forced on me. 

Likewise with all the Spanish language channels. I have no 
anti-Hispanic bias (we have lots of fine Hispanic people in 
our neighborhood and I like them all), I just don't want to be 
forced to have to click through a bunch of channels in a language 
that I don't understand.  I just want the channels that >>I<< want, 
and not a bunch of other garbage (to me) that I do not want. 

Regarding the converter boxes, your explanation of "wildly 
incompatible" factors may abe true; however my point remains ... 
and that is that my experience proved to me that it was and still 
>>IS<< possible to receive a perfect HDTV signal via cable >>without<< 
any nuisance converter box (and without any special card inside my TV). 

Therefore, all of Cox's fabricated excuses are, imho, just part 
of their great scam. 

Joe

------------------
On Thu, 2 Nov 2006, Ted Gould wrote
> On Thu, 2 Nov 2006, Josef Lowder wrote:
> > The crux of the problem is the complete lack of any real free-market
> > competition because of the complicity and collusion among the cable
> > and sat signal providers to scam the public by not allowing people
> > to just choose and pay for ONLY the channels they want.
> 
> This angst is largely misplaced.  While sat and cable companies are 
> the fronts for this, the real drivers are the media companies.  They 
> want you to get "bundles" of programming.  I good example of this is 
> the reported negotiations with Fox News.  (I don't want to talk 
> about the politics, let's just talk about them as a business today)  
> The rumor mill is saying that they're trying to increase their rate 
> from 22 cents per sub per month to almost a dollar.  (CNN is 44 
> cents, but Fox has better ratings) Rumors also say that the 
> sat/cable companies can get a "significant discount" if they agree 
> to carry the Fox Financial channel that they're trying to start. 
>  Boom, they're bundled.
> 
> While you can look at the economics of the situation as a company 
> like DirecTV with 15 million subscribers paying $50 a month; so they 
> take in $750 million/month.  The vast majority of that goes to 
> Viacom, News Corp, CNN, etc.  Realistically, the distributors 
> (sat/cable) are just middle men.
> 
> > The whole box converter thing is a needless scam anyway.
> >
> > When we first got our new HD in August, we were getting a bunch of
> > great, crystal clear, 9x16 HD signals over the same cable that we
> > previously had for our old analog TV.  But when a couple of those
> > channels just disappeared (after Cox took over), I called to find
> > out what the problem was and they told me that there never had been
> > any such channels as I had been watching for more than a month,
> > that it was impossible, there were no such channels.  That the
> > only way you could get those channels was by getting their box.
> 
> Well, while I'm not sure of their specific conditions, there are 
> some reasons for this.  The different cable network providers are 
> wildly incompatible.  If Cox has a Motorola system and the old one 
> was SA, they have to replace everything as they start to upgrade.  
> Also, they've probably moved some of the channels to MPEG4 and your 
> old boxes were only MPEG2.  Perhaps a modulation upgrade.  It's all 
> about bandwidth, they save it with video compression and increase it 
> with new modulation techniques. All of which require box upgrades, 
> headend upgrades, and usually a few network upgrades.
> 
> I won't say they aren't scam artists, but there are a few real 
> reasons for doing some of this.


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