Heavy rain did not keep the City of DuBois’ council meeting from opening with packed house leaving only around three seats open. Most of the public present were there to hear from Comcast representatives concerning changes to channels.
“The majority of our customers have digital convertor boxes and HD televisions,” said Comcast Representative Fran Bradley.
The root of many of the complaints is that Comcast, a company that deals with cable television, has been changing over its analog signals to digital in order to change with the times.
According to Bradley, retail stores now sell mostly high definition televisions and the main competitors for television subscribers, satellite and telephone companies, are primarily digital. The analog signals used by cable for the last 50 or so years are going the way of the rotary telephone.
Some channels that were available on the basic analogy system have been moved to the digital spectrum of the Comcast bandwidth. Some televisions, especially older ones, without Comcast digital convertor boxes are unable to view these channels.
“At some point in the future, I would say anywhere between the end of this year to 2011, just about every service on our system will be in a digital format,” explained Bradley.
He used the analogy of channels taking up “units” of bandwidth when sent to homes. An analog would take up six of these hypothetical units. Using a digital format each channel can fit within one “unit” of bandwidth.
According to Bradley these convertor boxes will be free for the first year with an offer for two additional boxes also being free for additional televisions. After the year each box will be $3 a month.
“I’m not too hung up on the first year. The last 18 months we wouldn’t need a box,” said Darrell Clark.
Several members of the audience were concerned about contradictory information. They felt they were told the basic service wouldn’t change and a convertor box wouldn’t be needed.
The questions appeared to fit into two groups. The first involved a communication error over the basic service. Several of the channels remain part of the basic service. Unless the customer has a digital convertor box they just aren’t visible.
The second group involved confusion over what the digital convertor box was. It was asked why these convertors were needed after being told for years leading up to the DTV conversion that cable users would not need to change a thing.
“There was the DTV transition that was mandated by the federal government, and then there was the digital migration,” said Bradley.
The DTV transition was for public channels that were mandated to be transitioned over earlier this year. The transition was already taken care of for cable customers through the cable provider. What Comcast, which provides to much of the area, is going through is second process called the “digital migration”.
The digital migration is a change going on with many television service providers to update the channels for high definition, HD, content to match the higher quality televisions now available. It is unrelated to the government mandated digital television mandate enacted earlier this year.