Comcast Brings Cable TV Back From the Brink

Back when satellite TV first came out, the cable TV industry was faced with a real challenge coming from the fact that its subscribers who had been content with the eighty or so channels that most cable TV companies at the time could provide suddenly had the opportunity to switch over to satellite TV and get about three times as many channels. Since then, the cable TV industry has been struggling to catch up, but apparently Comcast took the emergence of satellite TV as a challenge to rise to. Now, after lots of hard work and technological innovations, Comcast has risen to the point where it can serve as a realistic alternative to satellite TV. In fact, Comcast is superior to satellite TV in many ways.

There are a number of improvements that Comcast made on the older cable TV technology and business model that it used to rely on. The first improvement that it made was the conversion of all of its programming to digital TV format. With digital TV, the TV programming is essentially converted into computer data before its transmitted over the cable to the homes of cable TV subscribers. Once all of that data makes it to those homes, it’s reassembled into a TV picture and sound by sophisticated digital receiver equipment.

This technology offers a number of advantages. The most obvious advantage of digital TV is that the digital signal is very easy to cleanse of any interference that creeps into the signal during transmission. Interference like this of course is minimal when data is transmitted over a cable, but there’s still enough to give a slightly fuzzy appearance to TV programming transmitted using the old fashioned analog signal. The ability to clean out interference results in a crystal clear picture that’s very apparent in digital TV. Another advantage of digital TV is that it allows a variety of information about each program to be transmitted along with that program. This meta-information typically includes a description of the program and content ratings. An on screen program guide can then present this information to the viewer so that he or she what the program is about, and it can be used by parental control software to grant or deny access to the program to children who are watching TV without adult supervision. Comcast is able to offer both of those features thanks to digital TV technology.

Although digital TV technology forms the basis for Comcast’s service, it doesn’t stop there. For example, another type of technology that Comcast is heavily invested in is HDTV. HDTV is kind of like the next step in digital TV, with a much more detailed and higher resolution picture, Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound, and the same wide screen format of a commercial movie theater’s screen. Comcast offers an ever expanding line up of HDTV channels and programming.

Video on demand is another type of technology that Comcast is committed to. With video on demand, the viewer has access to a variety of different video clips that he or she can choose to access at will. Comcast uses this technology in its pay per view service and in extra features that can be added to a subscription.

Perhaps most importantly, Comcast has addressed the most prominent of those initial differences between cable TV and satellite TV: selection of channels. Comcast now offers over two hundred and seventy five channels, which officially makes it the rival of anything that satellite TV services can dish out.

With all of these features, Comcast has proven that cable TV will be a viable TV technology in the years and decades to come.

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