RHFtech Help Desk (and more)

This article was written by Tim Lusher, for guardian.co.uk on Tuesday 20th July 2010 11.15 UTC

He’s used to people hanging on his every erudite word. Now Stephen Fry – actor, author, quizmaster of QI, enthusiastic tweeter and celebrated brainbox – has announced that he is to make a series for BBC2 about language.

“It’s a bit of a secret but the BBC have commissioned me to do a five-part series on language, called Planet Word,” he said. “Language is my real passion. So, I’m going to Beijing to interview the man who invented Pinyin, a phonetic version of the Chinese language. He’s 105 years old … if he dies on me I’m going to be so annoyed.”

Last month, after delivering the Bafta annual television lecture in London, Fry, 52, complained to the audience about the “infantilism” of British TV. He revealed details of his highbrow new project to 14-year-old Eden Parris in an interview for a Radio Times feature that enabled young readers to meet their TV heroes. In a conversation that ranged from Harry Potter to Wagner, darts and porridge oats, he said: “I haven’t seen a good documentary about language, where it comes from, how we speak it, the variations of it, whether languages are dying, whether we are better at speaking than we were. There are so many questions.”

Fry – voted most intelligent man on TV in 2006 by RT readers – said his favourite words were Anglo-Saxon “like bundle – what a lovely word”, although followers of his Twitter feed are used to a livelier, more playful turn of phrase – last week he used “wowser”, “brokenated” and “selfspank”. A devotee of Oscar Wilde, he has presented two series of Fry’s English Delight on Radio 4, discussing grammar and idiom.

He warned Parris that language could shape and limit people’s ambitions: “We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing – an actor, a writer – I am a person who does things – I write, I act – and I never know what I am going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.” It will have been a powerful message for his young interviewer to conjugate with.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

The glacial change from analog TV to all-digital is confusing and maddening for most people. We are whipsawed by a continuing flow of abrupt changes to our decades-old habits. All we want to do is watch television. Is that too much to ask for? Although these changes are announced long before the implementation dates, the proclamations are often ignored due to our overly busy lives. We are inundated with information. Today, there is too much information to absorb much less act upon until we have no choice.

Recent changes to the Cablevision system have a lot people in a dither about needing to add cable boxes to TVs that previously did not need them. Many of these TVs are in spare bedrooms, in playrooms or basements and are infrequently used.

Cablevision wants you to add cable boxes to all your televisions. It is in their interest. Though many of the newly installed cable boxes are free for the first year or two they will eventually result in increases to your monthly cable bill. Cablevision is not interested in providing you with options that do not require a cable box. Cablevision does not want you to switch to the Internet for video. It is harder for them to charge a premium for Internet-delivered shows. They do not want you to think you have choices.

There are alternatives, if you have an HDTV with a built-in QAM tuner.

I recently wrote Do you need a cable box from Cablevision?

• NO, if you have an HDTV with a QAM tuner.
• YES, if you have standard definition TV or an older HDTV without a QAM tuner.

Most HDTVs sold in the last 3-4 years have QAM tuners. They can display the digital over-the-air (OTA) broadcast station signals sent out from Cablevision. These are stations like WCBS HD or WNBC USPORTS, channels 2-1 and 4-4 respectively. I can receive more than 20 of these stations on my HDTV in Weston without a cable box, including Cablevision News 12 Connecticut (105-12). (See Do you need a cable box from Cablevision? for more information.)

This got me thinking,

“What would I add to an HDTV that is connected to Cablevision without a cable box in order to provide a more complete viewing experience?

If the HDTV is Internet-capable, the answer is as simple as connecting it to your Internet connection via Ethernet wire or a WiFi adapter. Most Internet-capable TVs provide connections to Netflix, YouTube, Amazon Video-On-Demand, Blockbuster On Demand, Flickr and a variety of other services.

If you have a Netflix subscription you can watch lots of movies and TV shows streamed over the Internet directly to your HDTV. Similarly, Amazon Video-On-Demand lets you buy or rent the video you want to watch streamed to your television. You may also be able to watch television shows via Hulu. This makes far more economic sense for seldom-watched TVs than paying a monthly fee to rent equipment from Cablevision.

Another alternative if your HDTV is not Internet-capable is an Internet-capable Blu-ray player. Many moderately priced players have Internet features like the HDTVs described above. These players let you watch video and other material from the Internet. They also play Blu-ray, DVD and CD optical discs.

A third alternative is to attach one of the major gaming consoles—the Nintendo Wii, the Microsoft Xbox, or the Sony PlayStation 3—to your HDTV. They all connect to the Internet and deliver video content similar to the alternatives mentioned above. Netflix and other services’ video can be shown using these gaming consoles. The also play optical discs and the PlayStation 3 includes a built-in Blu-ray player.

You might not need a cable box and end up saving money.

Beginning on June 15, 2010 many Cablevision customers were distressed to find they could no longer view TV stations on their televisions without a cable box. I have heard this from clients, friends and on several heated discussions on Facebook.

This is not true.

They now see the message below or something similar if they live in other parts of Cablevision’s territory, when tuning to an old, analog station, like 2 or 7. This message is technically correct yet misinforms Cablevision’s customers, making them think there are no channels they can view without a cable box.

All digital over-the-air (OTA) broadcast channels are unencrypted and available for viewing. These are the familiar New York OTA TV stations—WCBS, WNBC, WNYW, WABC, WWOR, WPIX, WNET and WLIW. Digital channels have numbers like 2-1 or 4-4, rather than the single number analog stations like 2 or 4.

You need an HDTV with a QAM tuner to view these channels. Your older standard definition TVs CANNOT receive digital channels without an intermediary device like a cable box that converts the digital signal to analog. Most HDTVs sold within the last 3 years have built-in QAM tuners. (QAM is an acronym for quadrature amplitude modulation, which is the format used in encoding and transmitting digital cable channels.)

You can tune to the digital OTA channels if you know how. This will vary with the HDTV and remote control. Check your manual for instructions on how to do this. You may be able to have the TV scan automatically for these channels.

You will NOT be able to see analog stations, like 2, 3, 4… or any non-OTA cable channels like CNBC, CNN or A&E, without a cable box.

Below is a partial list of the unencrypted digital OTA channels my HDTV can receive in Weston, CT, without a cable box. Your stations should be similar if not identical. Note that there are some cable-only channels on the list like News 12 and C-SPAN.

It would be surprising if you answered, “No.”  Except for cable company executives, we all feel that our ever-increasing cable or satellite TV bills are too high. However, even the executives understand how customers feel about these rising rates. The content producers, like Disney or Fox, are probably the major force at work causing this inflation. Cablevision tried to hold the line, in two high profile, publicly-reported fights with content producers HGTV/Food Network and ABC/Disney/ESPN.

Before cable and satellite TV
Once upon a time, we paid nothing for TV content. If you grew up before cable and satellite TV, when television shows were only broadcast over-the-air (OTA), you understand. TV stations and networks made their money from selling advertising. OTA still exists in most places but the selection of OTA shows is a small fraction of what cable or satellite TV vendors offer. If you live in outlying parts of major metropolitan areas you may not even get OTA.

No OTA here
Here in Southwestern Connecticut we do not get OTA TV. We are too far to receive the signals from New York City or Hartford, CT and too close to these cities to justify our own TV stations. If you live here and want to watch TV you need to subscribe to cable or satellite. The subscription television alternatives in this part of Connecticut are Cablevision, Comcast or Cox cable (depending upon where you live), DirecTV, Dish TV and AT&T U-verse. Verizon FiOS is available for a small part of Greenwich, CT.

Prices for TV services are similar for these vendors. Competition is the primary reason. Cable companies, AT&T and Verizon offer triple-play package deals, bundling television, phone and Internet services. The pricing for these packages is superior to buying the services à la carte. They also offer packages of TV channels rather than selling them à la carte.

An à  la carte menu?
Many people, including me, would like to buy our TV channels one-by-one rather than having the limited menu of choices. I want premium channels like Cinemax, Showtime, TMC and HBO. I don’t want sports, foreign language or kids channels. Unfortunately, that is not an option. If my family wants to watch TBS, TCM, the History and SyFy channels, we have to pay for Disney, HGTV, ESPN, FOX Sports and many other channels we do not watch. We never watch them but we have to pay for them. It is a tax, only not a government imposed one. We pay to keep sports channel costs low enough so that our sports-loving neighbors can watch beach volleyball along with the myriad professional sports shows. I wish it were otherwise. It is not.

How much does the cable company pay?
Recently a list of 2009 wholesale TV prices was published on the web. It was eye-popping. Did you know that sports channels comprise most of what we pay for each month? In 2009, ESPN charged cable companies $4.08 per month per subscriber, $48.96 a year. FOX Sports charged $2.37 per month. C‑SPAN was a bargain at $0.05.

I used this list to calculate what Cablevision is paying for non-premium cable channels. The SNL Kagan information was incomplete. Cablevision offers non-premium channels that are not on the list. The total monthly cost for the channels I could identify was $23.95 per subscriber.

Separate from deals for new subscribers or triple-play customers, Cablevision charges $55.95 per month for Family Cable, which includes broadcast basic. About half of that subscription price goes to pay ESPN/ABC/Disney, Viacom, FOX, NBC/Universal, and the other content companies. Cable companies also have to maintain substantial plant and equipment, provide customer service at our houses and over the phone, pay employees, pay taxes and make a profit.

Perhaps a better question is, “Why do we pay so much for TV sports channels like ESPN?”

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

Companies and industries that do not embrace change often come to regret that decision. This is a story of how American cable TV companies failed with CableCARD. They delayed complying with an FCC mandate, consistent with Section 629 of the 1996 telecommunications law, to "…assure the commercial availability to consumers… of converter boxes… from manufacturers, retailers, and other vendors not affiliated with… [the] programming distributor."

The consequence to cable companies is declining market share as alternative technologies replace the cable TV subscription model.

CableCARD was their response to the 1996 law. CableLabs, an industry group, developed the CableCARD to allow consumers to buy rather than rent set top boxes. Cable companies were slow to deploy them; probably, rightly fearing that they would lose rental fees for boxes and remotes.

The only two devices I know that work with CableCARDs are newer TiVos and Windows computers with OCUR digital cable tuners. Using CableCARDs requires paying for an installer visit and a modest monthly fee. I pay $4/mo. for 2 CableCARDs in my TiVo. Renting a Cablevision DVR would cost me about $20/mo. That DVR is a weak approximation of TiVo.

Computers make wonderful DVRs. Microsoft has offered the Media Center application since 2002. It comes in Vista Home Premium and most versions of Windows 7. Media Center, along with commercial and free open source alternatives, works great as a DVR. It requires one or more CableCARDs to display cable TV encrypted digital feeds and premium channels. The OCUR tuner made this possible.

OCUR was hobbled by CableLabs. They required that they certify the computer if it included an OCUR. I once read that they charge the PC makers $10,000 per model for this "service". Only AMD made OCUR tuners. HP, Dell and some niche computer makers offered these as additions to a few models. Adding to the difficulty, if you didn’t buy the OCUR(s) at the time you bought the PC you could not add them later.

Not surprisingly, OCUR-enabled PCs were a minuscule percent of PC sales. I believe that HP and Dell no longer offer OCUR provisioned PCs and that AMD has exited the business. At the recent CEDIA meeting Microsoft announced that we will be able to buy OCUR tuners to install into our existing PCs sometime in the future. Hauppauge and Ceton announced they will make add-on OCUR tuners for sale next year.

We have many alternatives to cable TV, satellite TV or broadcast TV today. Some are disc-based, most are Internet-based. Netflix, Redbox, and many town libraries make it simple to borrow a DVD at low or no cost. Amazon’s Video On Demand, the iTunes store, Vudu and Roku boxes, websites like Hulu.com, CBS.com and many others compete with traditional cable TV.

I wanted to promote and install PCs with OCUR tuners and CableCARDs for my customers, beginning in 2006, if it had been easy and affordable. I did not because CableLabs made it too difficult and too expensive. I explored and found alternatives to Cable TV. My clients and my family watch video on our computers hooked to our HDTVs, just not cable TV. Computer-based alternatives to cable TV have been multiplying like rabbits. It is hard to keep up.

My 16 year-old daughter rarely watches cable TV. She likes the flexibility that watching video on her computer offers. She can have her messaging apps open and pause the video to talk with her friends. She is typical of her generation.

Cable companies should have embraced consumers owning their own set top boxes rather than resisting. They will soon regret that decision as more and more customers abandon cable TV for the cheaper, easier and more satisfying alternatives.

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A client purchased an LG BD370 Blu-ray player to connect to the bedroom HDTV. The player features both BD Live and LG’s NetCast Entertainment Access (NBE). NBE allows the viewer to connect to the Internet and watch streaming video from Netflix, CinemaNow, YouTube and others. It can also access websites such as Yahoo’s Flickr to view photos.

The installation was normal until it came to connecting to the Internet. The house’s network is typical. We employ a D-Link router, with wireless 802.11n and wired Gigabit Ethernet and a couple of D-Link wired 24 port, Gigabit switches. The BD370 is connected to the LAN via a CAT6 cable.

Getting the unit to talk to the Internet proved to be a difficult time-consuming task. The network setup screen is limited. One can choose DHCP IP (dynamic IP addressing) or Static IP addresses. If you choose the latter you must supply an IP address, a subnet mask and a DNS (Domain Name Server) address. The first of many attempts was made using DHCP where the router supplies the address. The machine’s icon reported that it connected to the Internet but whenever we tried to access the web we would get a message about network congestion.

The unit does NOT show its IP address, subnet mask and DNS address, so it is hard to see what is wrong.

We then tried a static address and subnet mask using the network’s gateway address as the DNS address. This is a typical setup for devices connected to a LAN. We got the same message about network congestion. Next we tried connecting directly to the cable modem to make certain that the device could talk to the web. This worked.

Now it became an issue of solving what was blocking the device when attached to the router. The router did not report the device as one of its attached items. But we could ping it from a computer so it was definitely on the network. After many pings, other tests and reboots of routers, cable modems and the Blu-ray player the device showed up on the router’s device list. But we still could not communicate with the web. 

I then changed two things. I set up port forwarding for the device for port 32768 and set the static DNS address to 208.67.222.222 an OpenDNS DNS server. Problem solved!

This only took two days to solve, about 10 man hours in total. In the final analysis, it would have been cheaper to hook up a media center computer rather than the LG BD370.

Cablevision is my cable company. They provide me with three services—cable TV, Internet service and telephony, respectively Optimum IO TV, Optimum Online, and Optimum Voice. I was a happy customer, even a fan of Cablevision. They have top-notch, often bleeding edge technology and good technical support. What’s not for a geek like me to like—their billing department!

All the good will they built up over more than twenty years was extinguished by my encounter with their billing department today.

About a month ago I wanted to set up a web server using the hosting service that is included with my premium high-speed broadband Internet service they call Boost. I tried to access the web hosting to no avail. I spoke with three different technical support people over a two week period who all tried their best to help. Finally, Erik hit upon the idea of fixing the problem by rebuilding the account in their database, which he did and it worked, I think. You see, I started my server project when I had a window of available time. Since it took almost two weeks to fix the problem the window closed and I have not had the opportunity to set up the service.

Today I received two bills from Cablevision. I had paid the most recent bill on March 18, 2009 so this was a surprise. Adding further to my surprise was learning that Erik had precipitated a change in my account number and that Cablevision was now billing me for a stub period on the old account and about 40 days on the new account. They had also changed my billing cycle, moving it up from the end of the month to the middle. In effect, Cablevision was asking me to loan them about $100 for a month or more because of the way they fixed the web hosting problem.

I tried to explain this to five customer service representatives in the billing department. Their consistent response was that the billing was correct and they could do nothing to adjust it. They were indifferent to the fact that Cablevision had neither notified me that this would occur, nor gotten my approval. They did not dispute the events. They just were not going to fix this.

I have been a customer of theirs since 1987. I have always paid my bills on time, usually early. This means nothing. Their billing department acts like a bully and there is little I can do but add my voice to all other angry Cablevision customers.