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Comcast drops HBO and Showtime from analog cable service

J

Jul

Guest
AS of today in Ne/Nw Philadelphia service area for comcast, they have removed HBO and Showtime from the analog cable. You have to have digital cable to get the 2 channels. Thoughts on this and is this happening in other comcast systems in the Philadelphia TV market?
 
Old news:

Philadelphia Inquirer said:
HBO move riles some Comcast customers
By Miriam Hill
Inquirer Staff Writer

Comcast Corp. is giving some viewers a little agita by pushing HBO into its more expensive digital-cable tier just weeks before The Sopranos begins its final season. The switch adds as much as $4.95 per cable box to an affected customer's monthly bill, though Comcast says only a small number will have to pay that. ...

Full Article
Click to expand...

A step in the right direction.

FIOS, DirecTV and Dish are completely digital.

Comcast charges more for a noticably inferior analog picture on the terrestrial analog stations and on the most-widely-viewed cable channels (channels 1-99). These analog channels look terrible on an HDTV receiver.

Comcast advertises digital cable but in reality most of what most people watch is still analog.

They need to make their whole system all-digital, all the time. They should do something about their video compression which degrades picture quality, too. And to call their DVR a POS box would be an insult to POSs.

Besides, the analog tier only includes HBO-1 and Showtime-1, not the whole packages (but you have to pay the same).

Further these are premium channels. People who pay for a single premium channel (really part of a larger digital premium package) are complaining about having to pay for digital? If price is an issue, they shouldn't be getting a premium channel in the first place. And they shouldn't be getting Comcast which is more expensive than the alternatives. Drop Comcast.

Besides, you can get all the HBO and Showtime original series via Netflix, watch them whenever you want, plus get any movie and TV show available on DVD, for not much more than you pay now for one HBO or one Showtime channel.
 
However, people won't be clamoring for all-digital when they find out that each converter box (after the 1st one) costs $9/month, plus the remote which is $3 per month. Just called them this am to relocate my service. Well, we have digital cable on the downstairs TV but not elsewhere. When I inquired about having it on the upstairs TV is when gave me the sobering news. No 'volume' deals - even with our triple play subscription that include phone and internet services.

Forget it, we can live with the 70 or so analog channels up there for the time being. Same is true of the guest room.

Before y'all cheer for Comcast to go all-digital, think about what it'll mean for you if you have multiple TVs. Right now, they turn it on and you can usually get analog cable throughout the house. If they went all digital, you would need a converter box for each TV. For which you'll pay handsomely. More money for Comcast to use in their gleaming new tower.....and less for you.

By the way, we would have gone with FIOS - but its not available yet in our new area.
 
BRNout said:
More money for Comcast to use in their gleaming new tower.....and less for you.
Click to expand...

Just watched the recent Rocky movie on DVD. Isn't that the Comcast building where Rocky's yuppie kid, his obnoxious friends and the sleazy boss worked? The bunch of them lived down to my image of Comcast. Maybe in the next movie, Rocky beats up Brian Roberts. ::)
 
Bah, comcast removed HBO and Showtime (and the rest) from the analog cable over 2 years ago here in Deptford. Actually, the channels are still physically there, but there scrambled without the box, even if you pay for the channels. I guess comcast is too lazy to remove them, since all of the hbo's are in the 300's aswell.
 
Julius May said:
AS of today in Ne/Nw Philadelphia service area for comcast, they have removed HBO and Showtime from the analog cable. You have to have digital cable to get the 2 channels. Thoughts on this and is this happening in other comcast systems in the Philadelphia TV market?
Click to expand...

Yep, old news. I haven't had analog HBO in 2+ years, either.
 
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