Re: Brother, have you been converted?

John Mitchell:
> I can understand the commercials for various companies' brands of
converter
> boxes not exactly telling the whole story.  But the so-called news
stories
> -- the items that appear as part of the program content, not the
commercial
> content, of the news -- the ones I've seen are not emphasizing this
point:
> 
> You only need a converter box (or a digital-receiving set) if you're
> watching over-the-air broadcast signals, if you're getting your programs
> through the antenna.  If you have cable, or if you have satellite TV,
you
> can have the oldest TV set still working and it will still work without
a
> converter.

Uh-huh -- but is that also just for the time being?  That is, does the
US have any regulation requiring cable companies to continue to provide
analog service?

For that matter, does Canada?  (Analog broadcasting here doesn't end
until 2011, last I heard.)

At the moment we have a "cable-ready" analog TV set and two VCRs.
Which means we have one traditional coax cable coming into the
house, plugged into the first VCR, a short cable leading from
that to the second, and another from that to the TV, and all three
can tune independently to all non-premium channels offered by the
cable company.

Rogers Cable has been gung-ho on digital services for quite a while
now, presumably because these give them more op****tunity to charge
for things separately: if they decided to stop offering analog
cable to existing customers, our whole setup would no longer work.

(Of course at some point we may well decide to switch to digital service
in order to get HD TV, but that would be our decision, and is off-point.
And of course good TV is pretty much a thing of the past anyway, but
that's also off-point.)
-- 
Mark Brader, Toronto          "To great evils we submit; we resent
msb@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
                    little provocations." -- W. Hazlitt, 1822

My text in this article is in the public domain.