[Rich A]

Originally Posted by ed_peters

That was an OTA switch to digital, Cable did not switch (although as earlier messages indicate, they will be in the not too distant future).

Every cable provider has it's own ideas on how to handle this. All those regular analog cable stations you used to get were actually (in most cases) gotten by the cable company via sat. feed and local terrestrial feeds. When all the terrestrial analog stations were shut down, the cable companies (just like you and I) no longer had that feed. And thus THEY had to then change to the digital feeds.

It's easier for the cable provider to just re-transmit their own digital feeds, (which is now all they have) to us the users. This is why you see the cable companies doing a lot of channel adjustments and frequency changes as they themselves also make the digital transition. Most people don't realize that the cable companies also lost their analog "feeds".

What is interesting here in CT with Cox cable is that they are still sending all the analog cable stations just as before. What they are actually doing is taking the new digital feeds and encoding them real time back down to analog. I've been told they intend to do this at least until 2012.

Other cable providers (because they lost their analog feeds) are now giving their analog customers who don't have digital equipment free converter boxes.

FWIW I'm curious why Cox chose to go the way they did? I wonder if it was cheaper to just encode their new digital feeds back to analog and continue to feed that rather than offer us free converter boxes. In my case my TV is an older cable ready analog TV. My home theater however is all Beyond TV with several tuners.