• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Cable Moves Toward a Totally Digital World

Posted on: Saturday, 11 February 2006, 15:00 CST

By MARTHA McKAY, STAFF WRITER

In the dark ages before digital, the most sophisticated thing you could do with your cable TV was point the remote at the cable box and order a pay-per-view movie.

These days, cable companies offer everything from movies on- demand to the ability to choose camera angles for a sports broadcast thanks to their upgrade to digital and their customers are signing up.

In North Jersey, digital is especially popular. Some cable operators with subscribers in the region report as many as two- thirds have switched from the older analog service to digital. That's far more than the overall U.S. average, which is about one in three cable subscribers with digital connections.

Using digital technology, cable companies can compress their signal and send more services over the line. The older analog signals use up more "space" on the cable, thus limiting the number and type of services the companies can offer.

The push to introduce customers to digital service is motivated in part because cable companies can extract more dollars per month from digital customers.

The service typically adds about $10 more to your cable bill, and charges can quickly accrue for other things like packages of programs and movies on demand.

"It provides a gateway to the on-demand and interactive services that have proved to be very popular," said Brian Dietz, spokesman for the National Cable & Telecommunications Association.

"The combination of more channels, interactivity and the ability to personalize the viewing experience makes digital cable an attractive product."

The move to digital is also a way for cable companies to compete against both satellite rivals which offer digital service and phone companies like Verizon. The phone provider is starting to offer sophisticated digital TV services of its own in some states.

There are still more old-fashioned analog cable customers than digital, but the cable companies have had success enticing customers to switch.

In early 2001, about 12 million subscribers had digital cable service in the U.S., according to the NCTA. By 2005, that number had climbed to 26 million digital customers, or a bit more than one- third of all U.S. cable subscribers, said Dietz.

In some areas, the percentage is higher.

Time-Warner reports 70 percent of customers in its New York-New Jersey territory have digital cable service. The cable operator has about 54,200 subscribers in Bergen County.

Along with piping in quantities of music-only channels, digital service lets customers download movies on demand, giving you the ability to watch a movie when you want and allowing you to stop the show, rewind, fast-forward, etc.

Time-Warner's on-demand library, for example, consists of 435 choices, such as full-length movies, music videos and cartoons. The vast channel landscape also includes a karaoke on-demand channel for those moments when you feel the need to be accompanied.

Cablevision, the largest operator in North Jersey, added half a million digital customers last year and says about 61 percent of all video subscribers now receive digital service.

The company has developed a wide range of services that allow subscribers to customize things such as news and weather, or use the MSG game director to pick their own camera angle for Knicks, Rangers and Mets home games.

Most of the larger cable companies use their digital tier to deliver international programming. Catering to the large immigrant populations and foreign language speakers, Cablevision, for example, offers programming in Spanish, Chinese, Indian/South Asian languages, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese and Russian.

Even the smallest providers such as US Cable of Paramus and Hillsdale offer digital services such as the ability to scan program guides and block objectionable programming.

Many cable operators also lease digital video recorders, which let you pause and rewind live television. Cablevision leases a DVR for about $10 a month to digital customers.

Comcast, which serves a large swath of central and southern New Jersey, as well as a small portion in Bergen County (about 24,000 customers), has persuaded about 9 million of its 21.4 million customers to switch to digital, according to Page Thompson, vice president and general manager of on-demand. They have been adding about 1 million digital subscribers per year, he said.

"We'd like very much for all our customers to be digital customers," Thompson said.

* *

E-mail: mckay@northjersey.com

Source: Record, The; Bergen County, N.J.

More News in this Category