Switched Digital Video (SDV) and me
I am a fan of Cablevision. They provide a great choice of bleeding edge technology services, which they seem to be constantly adding to and improving. They have the best customer service for a large company. I do not know of other large companies in their league when it comes to customer service. Sure, I wish their services cost less (free would be great) but I feel they provide real value for the price. I cannot make this statement about my AT&T Wireless service.
I am also a fan of TiVo. They revolutionized TV-viewing for me and millions of other TiVo/DVR users. I have had many TiVos through the years. I upgraded to the TiVoHD several years ago. Unlike the earlier TiVo versions it requires CableCARDs to get most of the cable company channels. These little cards require a cable company technician for installation but then disappear from consciousness. They cost a few dollars a month to rent, less than the cable company boxes.
The switch to high definition (HD) television signals put a strain on the capacity of the cable companies. They have large pipes but their capacity is not infinite. So they are changing their model for distributing content signals to subscribers.
Before HD the cable companies pushed every channel down every coaxial cable to all their customers. If you had a cable box and subscribed to premium channels you could decrypt the channel signal and watch the content. If you didn’t subscribe you could not see the channel but it was streaming into your house.
Cable companies are implementing switched digital video (SDV) to cope with the extra bandwidth requirements of high definition. SDV is more like the Internet. You send a URL request for a webpage and that gets sent to your browser. SDV works similarly. The cable companies are more discriminating now. Rather than stream all their channels to every household all the time, they send the most commonly watched channels to everyone but only send infrequently watched channels when a subscriber actually wants to watch it. They conserve bandwidth this way and can accommodate a much larger selection of high definition channels.
SDV requires that the subscriber’s cable equipment communicate your channel choice back to the cable system so that they can send you the channel you want to watch. CableCARDs are one-way devices that do not work with SDV signals. As an example, if I want to watch the Encore HD channel, 816 on Cablevision in my area, I need a cable box because 816 is an SDV channel that is only streamed when a subscriber wants to watch. The TiVoHD cannot make that request.
The cable companies provide SDV Tuning Adapters to workaround the limitation that CableLabs, a cable industry association, designed into CableCARDs. The tuning adapter boxes are generally provided free to CableCARD customers, like me.
I picked up a Cisco STA1520 tuning adapter at the Cablevision Norwalk, CT store last week. I installed it yesterday.
I am not a fan of the tuning adapter. The box is overly large for its limited functionality, 11.75” x 8” x 1.75” (w-d-h). It adds three more cables to my home theater cabling mess. It adds to the heat generation and electrical requirements, and is yet another lighted LED in my home theater. Since it has a USB connection to the TiVoHD it could get its power via USB if Cisco designed it better, eliminating the need for a power cable and AC/DC block. It also requires a call to Cablevision to activate once it is successfully installed.
The box takes at least 20 minutes to install if all goes well. It took me 50 minutes to install because I mistakenly connected the USB cable when I installed the box. You are supposed to wait until the tuning adapter is ready before doing that. It took a call to Cablevision, a 15 minute wait on hold and then talking to two CSRs before it was fixed.
I can now watch channel 816. Whoopee!
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You might want to read my prior post about CableCARDS and computer OCURs – Too little, too late, too difficult, too expensive