Time Warner Cable HDTV - Page 5

This is interesting -- and has got me thinking. While we've wanted to blame the content providers, perhaps TWC is a little smarter than we give it credit for. The number of households with an HDTV is skyrocketing. TWC knows that adding StarzHD will increase the number of subscribers to Starz programming. So, from TWC's view, why shouldn't Starz share some of this additional revenue with TW for the additional bandwidth being taken? In other words, TWC should get a bigger cut of the per subsciber fee in proportion to the increase bandwidth being used by Starz. Competition is the only thing that really prevents this type of strategy.

TWC might endup being the biggest loser of a company when it comes to sports this year. Lets see what they will be missing. ESPN2 HD which is a big channels missing but lets not forget about the good old NFL because its insult enough to tell all your HD customers they won't see ESPN2 HD but to tell them they can't see 8 extra NFL games this year because they also want to be the only frickin company that doesn't offer NFL Network. I must be honest in that yes Comcast isn't perfect but I'm so glad I'm not living in Florida hell with the cable company from hell called BHN. I'm in a frickin rural area in New Hampshire and I have more On Demand offerings, more HD channels including "all" local HD channels, ESPN2 HD and NFL Network along with a nice good old all digital lineup with my digital boxes. Even better I'll soon have Tivo software with my dual tuner Comcast box. Also my bill for their triple play service at its regular price is what I paid with a 25/month off pro with BHN for the same exact services. To make this even better I'm getting my service for 50 bucks less per month for the next 12 months as a new customer compared to BHN.

I'm sorry to start TWC and BHN bashing but I must be honest because I see no way a person in a much more rural area should be getting way way way way way more value from their cable company compared to where I was in Florida with almost 800,000 people in the same space only 15,000 people are in. No frickin way that should ever occur but that is BHN for you. I will say that I know many people bash Comcast and I admit that no company is perfect but from a person who had BHN in Tampa Bay Comcast is like Verizon in that they are just so much of a jump in quality, offerings and pricing.

Did you guys see this in the other thread?? Maybe there is hope for us TWC subscribers ???

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"Disney, ESPN's papa, had been holding ESPN2 HD as part of negotiations to get its entire channel lineup on Comcast. As of early this week, HDTV-subscribing soccer fans were likely to pay the price, with 33 of 64 World Cup games slated for ESPN2. But the companies worked out a deal for the one channel, beginning with the Germany-Costa Rica opener at 9 a.m. today and continuing most prominently with U.S.-Czech Republic on Monday."

Does Time Warner have an HD PPV channel? I want to order the Hopkins/Tarver fight tomorrow night and I was wondering if I would be able to see it in HD. Thanks for the help.

TWC could potentially lose me as a customer this fall if DTV has their HD locals in San Antonio up and running. I will not tolerate the lack of the NFL Network and ESPN2-HD when TWC could have added this in time for the NFL season.

chief17 TWC does have a HD PPV channel

I'm dying for ESPN2 HD.

-- Cain

Does that mean we have hope of them to show up here in NY?

The channel guide in San Antonio has been updated. Here's a snapshot showing MaxHD on 182 and StarzHD on 183. I called this morning and added MaxHD for an additional $4.75 over my current package.

Well. its a start. I guess this means that TWC has struck a deal with both StarzHD and MaxHD. Its all up to the local providers now onw how long we will have to wait..

Only if TWC decides to stop sucking up all of its bandwidth for phone and internet service.....

phone and internet actually take up very little bandwidth.

Link to this article.

Only problem is DTV doesn't really have anything in HD.

You can make the technical argument, however, HD Lite football is better than NO HD football at all

Give me macroblock free football or give me a radio. With the radio at least I can imagine the perfect picture while listening to the broadcast. There are no macro-blocks in my head, Baby!

Phone, maybe, but I can't see how you can claim that their high speed internet doesn't take up much bandwidth....

I was watching the Argentina vs. Netherlands game, and they announced the two round-of-16 games on the weekend (the afternoon games that will not be broadcast by ABC) on ESPN2, not ESPN. That means no HD for us (TWC subscribers once again).

Can that be right? I checked all schedules on the web, including on ESPN.com, and they all list all games from Saturday on on ESPN (not ESPN2), with the exception of one quarter-final. Please tell me that the announcers made a mistake!!! I had been worried about that because I saw ESPN2 and not ESPN on TWC website, but I thought it was a mistake by TWC.

When you compare it to video, I don't think it does.

IIRC I think one DOCSIS channel provides 27MBit of bandwidth.

Assuming 500 total customers per node, and 1/3 of them using Road Runner, that's 167 Road Runner customers. I would think that they can use more than one channel, so with 3-4 channels for Road Runner per node, I think they'd be just fine.

There's no question that voice does not take up very much bandwidth at all. One uLaw (the optimum voice codec for VoIP) channel is 64k/s, and that 27MBit stream could comfortably hold 250-300+ calls.

As for video content taking up more bandwidth, that is definitely true. The diagnostic 611/999 menu on your box, if you can get it to it, will let you see the frequencies of any given channel. A TV with a QAM tuner will show you the regular channel numbers of the digital channels. Digital channels start at 73 here and go up all the way to 121, with a few channels with no digital av content at all (probably internet) and all and a few analog channels.

Here, it seems like all of the Music Choice channels are on cable channel 90. Since most of the digital cable channels are encrypted, I can't access them on my TV directly, but the TV will detect and attempt to tune them. They did forget to encrypt the 70s channel for some reason, so I can watch/listen to that one. There are about 40-45 digital channels on channel 90. Since the video is encoded at a ridiculously low bitrate, there is lots of room for the audio (which I suspect isn't encoded at a very high bitrate either).

There are many digital channels that I can't view/hear on my TV because they are encrypted. Analog channels seem to have anywhere from 5-20 digital channels in them (except for Music Choice, which is 40+).

The HD channels usually have no more than 4 streams on one channel. Channel 80 has NBC, NBC weather, PBS "test channel", and PBS. 104 has ABC and FOX. 108 has CBS, UPN, and UPN's music station. As for premiums, 113 has INHD2, Showtime West, and HBO West.

Conclusion?
Based on my estimations, two to three HD channels take about as much bandwidth as anywhere from one fifth to one half of a node's internet customers. In other words, Internet and Voice do not use as much bandwidth as video.

This is based on assumptions and limited research on Wikipedia and Google, not any real knowledge of cable infrastructure.

PS:
I assume that Business Class has its own channel(s) as well, and probably has more channels allocated for it in areas that have more Business Class customers. For example, at the location where I work, it's unlikely that there are any other Biz Class customers nearby (and those that are are probably on the 3/512 plan, not the 7/1 that we have.)

Nice investigative overview, dj9. Tried some of that with my cable system a few years back, but mapping each cable channel to a frequency, and thus determining channel density/256-QAM 6-MHz slot, was too formidable a task here. Always thought 'group processing' for any cable head end, with various subscribers only logging X number of channels into a prepared spreadsheet (for sorting by frequency), would help. Suspect having ~8 SD channels per 6-MHz-wide 256-QAM slot (~39 Mbps) instead of 10-15, or 2 HDs instead of 3-4, makes a significant PQ difference. Cable head ends can use rate shaping to squeeze more channels into slots.

Agree standard voice/Internet shouldn't eat up that much bandwidth. But video on demand sure does, because motion video, even MPEG compressed, has much information changing typically each 1/60 sec. -- John

What a polite and well-written amalgamation for what is essentially a "BEND OVER/SCREW YOU" response!

Andy, you know NYC it's thae only place that doesn't have this, please stop acting like NYC is the only place in the universe that doesn't have this. I mean, come on Alpha Centari is only picking up what we broadcast OTA!

Good Andy, keep your sail in the wind.

It certainly doesn't hurt to remind them that we are not content with their offerings.

I get the feeling, from talking to the Director of Marketing for our local TWC outlet, that they would like to add more HD content and they have deals in place. What's holding them back, at least here in Charlotte, is an acute lack of bandwidth. And the "necessity" of adding more and more spanish-speaking channels in bandwidth hogging analog. I'm not happy about that, but my town must be 10% illegal aliens at this point, from the looks of things, and those folks do like to watch TV in their native language. Collectively, they constitute a bigger market share than us HDTV-lovin' folks. Apparently, the two TWC affiliates with the tightest bandwidth situation in the country are Charlotte and Los Angeles. Why, I have no idea.

This paradigm should change, he tells me, when they get something called "digital switching" installed. Then, there will be room for all sorts of new HD channels and their excuses for not adding some of 'em will evaporate. So, the moral of the story is that everyone in the TWC orbit needs to encourage the adoption of digital switching technology as soon as possible.

Funny, after reading this post I came up with a different moral.