How much longer will analog cable hang on

[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by Keefla

I remember this type of cable box from the 80's. my family had one when i was younger, we also had a black box type with a dial click tuner type knob on the front....that one also went to 36 or 37, in my parents room they had a kinda cool box where the 'box' was just an unpainted metal box with the cable in/out and a looooong wire coming out of it going to a beige box with a slide-type selector along the front and fine tuning knob at the end. the channel numbers were listed along the front above the slider and they would illuminate when you positioned the slider behinde them, indicating the channel. these all were from about 84-87 id say. the wire on the one in my parents room was too short for my dad to change the channels from his bed to he spliced in a length of telephone wire to it so it's reach.

We had that type of Jerrold box (with the 13 buttons, a fine tuning control, and a switch to select one of three ranges of channels) when Lake County, Ohio got cable service in the early 1980s -- 1982, if memory serves. There was one on the living room TV and one on my Zenith 13" portable in my bedroom, but we never had remote control cable boxes. These Jerrold boxes received up to, IIRC, 39 channels and worked well on the cable systems of the time, but of course they will not work with today's digital cable systems. I wonder if Jerrold has since developed cable boxes that will receive digital channels, and which look almost exactly like the old analog ones. I know Motorola's DTV box is a fancy, computer-controlled affair (I had one when I had digital cable some years ago), but am not sure if Jerrold, et al. have come out with such boxes for digital cable as well.

I would think they have, since all cable systems are or soon will be all digital. I just read online an article (from Broadcasting and Cable.com) that stated the FCC will end, shortly, its must-carry regulations which now require all cable companies to carry analog as well as digital channels. The analog service is now used mostly by cable subscribers with old NTSC TVs who want those channels but do not want a cable box (i.e. they want to connect the cable directly to the TV). When this rule is eliminated, however, everyone, regardless of what kind of TV they own (I assume this will also include flat screens), will have to rent a cable box to get anything other than broadcast channels on their sets. Time Warner Cable is one cable operator that may be exempt from this, as every channel they carry is now in digital format, even if the user's TV shows "NTSC" in the info box which appears when one changes channels.

The FCC forbids cable operators from scrambling, or otherwise rendering unwatchable, broadcast channels; however, since TW's service (across all tiers, including, if memory serves, standard cable) is now and has been for some time all digital, I do not think any change in the agency's (FCC) regulations will affect them to any great extent.

BTW, in my area and across all other systems in northeast Ohio and western Pennsylvania, Time Warner Cable moved the TV Guide Channel from analog channel 13 to digital channel 230, effective today, June 13 (!), 2012. I can't help but wonder what other channels and/or services may be next in line to be eliminated from standard cable.

I say "June 13 (!)" because of the date of this change, which is today, June...yup, you guessed it...13th. I wonder if Time Warner purposely planned it this way, i.e. to have the date of the change coincide with the TV Guide Channel's former analog channel position.