1 new of 290 responses total.
Yup, more money for no improvement is a pretty good example of how not to deploy things. Re #67, I've seen occasional audio dropouts for a couple of seconds but haven't experienced what you describe. Sounds lousy. Cable companies are kinda stuck. On the one hand, they have early adopters whose main priorities are digital transmission (way better for DVR) and lots of high-quality HD content. They are willing to pay a premium price but they expect a premium product, and when they're forced to watch a crappy analog static-filled feed of the SciFi channel they're not happy. On the other hand, you have foot-draggers who still use analog cable with old cable-ready TVs. They enjoy watching whatever their favorite channels are, CNN or ESPN or whatever. They don't particularly care about picture quality as long as it doesn't totally suck, and they're not particularly interested in new services. Their main priority is not seeing their bill go up; they already feel like they pay too much for the service they get. I don't particularly envy the kinds of decisions that cable companies are forced to make in figuring out how to service both crowds. Soon DirecTV will roll out local feeds in HD, and a ton of new HD channels will launch (National Geographic-HD, MTV-HD, HGTV-HD, and so on.) Early adopters will expect their cable systems to make at least some of them available. Foot-draggers will expect nothing to change. Not sure it's possible to meet both expectations.
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