Cable TV Moves Ahead of Satellite TV In Functionality

Cable TV is coming into its own for the second time in the past few decades. Back in the nineteen eighties, cable TV was the preferred way of getting a lot channels to choose from. Over the air TV didn’t have the same kind of selection or the same ability to show special content, and satellite TV was too expensive for most people. Then in the nineties, satellite TV became cheaper than cable and offered more channels. Now in the twenty first century, cable TV has implemented new technology that makes it better than satellite TV again in a many ways.

The most important thing that the cable TV industry did was convert its transmission format form analog to digital. Analog TV was extremely susceptible to interference while digital TV is highly resistant to it. The result of this property is a clear picture and extremely high quality sound. Digital TV also doesn’t take up as much bandwidth as analog TV does. This allows more channels to be able to be sent over a single cable, making cable TV competitive with satellite TV now. In fact, three hundred channels is totally within reach of customers of companies like Time Warner Cable.

Another feature that digital cable TV provides standard is an on screen program guide. This is a feature that can be brought up at the same time as any channel and that will allow the viewer to see each and every program that’s available in every time slot. This isn’t like the channel that came with many analog cable services that had listings scrolling on the bottom of the screen. An on screen program guide actually allows the viewer to navigate and focus on what’s on each and every channel, as well as the ability to go directly to the channel.

One thing that digital cable TV is much better at providing than satellite TV is video on demand. Video on demand is really any technology that gives the viewer a choice of videos and allows them to select and immediately watch the video of her or his choice. Satellite TV simply doesn’t have the capacity to do this other than by placing videos on a DVR and making them available to viewers- a solution that simply can’t provide access to that many videos. Cable TV can do this easily because it allows a video feed to be sent to each and every receiver box individually, where satellite technology can’t do that nearly as effectively.

On top of that, cable TV is easily combined with other home telecommunications services like telephone and Internet. The Internet in particular is easy to deliver over a cable, and cable TV companies deliver the fastest high speed Internet service available. In fact, speeds of 8 mbps are pretty typical.

Phone service is also easy for modern cable TV companies to implement. In fact, the calling plans from cable TV companies tend to be much better values than you can possibly get from the phone company these days.

Because of all of these possibilities, it could be argued that Time Warner Cable TV is the TV delivery technology of the future.