Local Analog Cable Broadcast Signal Quality Analysis
 

With the ongoing slow transition to a digital signal by American broadcasters, the analog signal quality has largely been ignored and suffered dramatically. Symbiotic Design™ provides a simple HTML page base with which customers may enjoy our web site in any browser without alienating anyone for newer technologies. Unfortunately, we believe that the cable industry has alienated viewers from some channels and have been ignoring their advertisers' investment into broadcast commercial advertising. This article is intended to provide a guideline for broadcast advertisers as to what the local community sees.
 

While we praise the United States Government's extremely overdue transition from an analog to a digital broadcast signal, it's implementation by the private sector has been terrible at best. Analog cable customers are largely ignored and are fed poor image picture quality signals. This alienates many potential customers with poor quality reception on particular channels. These channels are most often deleted from the viewer's television memory and/or avoided completely. Furthermore, the local cable company is unwilling or unable to correct this problem for what once was considered a premium service. This list is intended as a guide for broadcast commercial advertisers to follow since a considerable portion of the local viewing public will never bother to view particular channels until upgrading to a digital signal.

Part of the reason that local cable companies ignore pleas for the flicker free high quality analog signals which we once enjoyed is that the US Government has mandated that a transition from the analog broadcast signal tonew digital standards be completed by the year 2006. After the year 2006, analog video broadcast satelites will cease to exist and analog broadcast licenses must be returned to the federal government. The FCC (Federal Communications Commission) will then reallocate the frequencies for other uses. This gives cable companies no motivation to solve existing problems with the current analog signal and plenty of motivation for pushing digital cable.

The transition to from our NTSC analog video broadcast to digital involves the support for 2 new and different standards. HDTV (High Definition Television) is a digital standard for clear and compelling high resolution television and requires upgrading to an HDTV capable television system (monitor and receiver). SDTV (Standard Digital Television) is a digital standard with a minute resolution improvement which requires upgrading to an SDTV capable system (monitor and receiver) to take advantage of the negligible picture quality improvement. The SDTV signal can be viewed on an analog system with no improvement in resolution through an signal converter box.

It is clear that the inclusion of a second low resolution standard is hampering the proliferation of the HDTV standard dramatically. The lower resolution SDTV digital signal allows broadcasters to generate up to 6 broadcasts in place of 1 HDTV signal. Hence, broadcasters are concentrating on producing more crap in greater quantities rather than providing quality content on a decent high quality carrier wave.

Now the cable company offers digital cable as a premium service. This new premium service requires a set top box to view the signal on analog television sets. Digital cable provides a better signal reception, however this still degrades the originating broadcast and picture resolution just as in the analog signal. Once more, analog cable used to provide the same high quality signal reception. Consumers are no longer getting what they paid for unless they upgrade to the premium digital service and add another component to their systems (a digital convertor).

We are tired of the poor analog reception we receive at home and our cable company's inability to address this problem for years. We are sick of complaining about the lack of quality in our reception. We have no confidence in the company which provides this service and therefore will not upgrade to digital cable until HDTV sets are affordable and HDTV signals are abundantly available. However, this long awaited standard is proving to be unsupported by anyone accept for the premium pay networks. Therefore, without wide distribution of HDTV we have no reason to upgrade. The majority of cable subscribers seem to feel the same way we do. But we loss quality by sticking with a cheaper alternative. Quality that was once available to us.

The quality of some channels in the analog cable spectrum have suffered more than others. The tables below are intended to enlighten advertisers and the general public which channels are worthy of their advertising dollars, and which ones just plain suck.

We do hope to expand this list for other areas in the future. If you would like to submit such a list for your local viewing area, please copy this page and replace our data with yours, then send the list as an attached HTML document to: