[homeskillet]

By DAN MARGOLIES
The Kansas City Star

It irks Fairway resident Matthew Meeds that he has to rent a cable box from Time Warner Cable in order to watch premium channels.

He'd rather buy one from a manufacturer of his own choosing. But Time Warner doesn't give him that option. Instead, like the company's other customers in the Kansas City area, Meeds must pay a monthly fee for the box.

More: http://www.kansascity.com/746/story/745876.html

 

[Nick]

Welcome to the club, Pal!

 

[Richard King]

I think it's probably NTSC.

 

[dpeters11]

It could be worse. Frontier Communications (home of the 5GB cap) lets you use your own DSL modem, but you still have to pay the rental fee for their DSL modem that you don't have.

 

[AirRocker]

It could be worse. Frontier Communications (home of the 5GB cap) lets you use your own DSL modem, but you still have to pay the rental fee for their DSL modem that you don't have.

Wow... That's ridiculous...

 

[HIPAR]

I think he can win. Didn't the FCC begin to enforce its mandate that cable boxes cannot include security with an intention to allow subscribers to buy their own?

Of course in reality there may be difficulty buying your own cable box; I haven't seen any at the big box stores. Then, what's to stop a cable company from charging the same rental fee for the decoder card that plugs into a privately owned cable box?

--- CHAS

 

[machavez00]

If he has a newer set he can use a cable card, or do they charge for that as well?

Edit:Cox Cable charges $1.99 a month and a $29.99 install charge

 

[Cholly]

If he has a newer set he can use a cable card, or do they charge for that as well?

Edit:Cox Cable charges $1.99 a month and a $29.99 install charge

Time Warner in the Charlotte area charges a similar amount for CableCards. Interestingly, most TV manufacturers are now shying away from CableCard slots, probaably because of the grief they endure when the cable company messes up on an installation and in addition, because current CableCards don't support bidirectional communication and therefore don't support VOD (video on demand). Additionaly, with the advent of SDV (switched digital video), an additional adapter is required to handle the switching.
The cable companies are mostly clueless when it comes to CableCards. It took three service calls by assorted TW techs to get two single stream CableCards up and running on my Series3 TiVo and five (plus intervention by Time Warner's CableCard support group) to get a Multistream card installed on my HD TiVo. In addition, the customer service people were clueless when it came to placing my order. Further, it took a few billing cycles to get them to remove the charges for "Navigator" service from my bill.

 

[allargon]

The cable companies are mostly clueless when it comes to CableCards. It took three service calls by assorted TW techs to get two single stream CableCards up and running on my Series3 TiVo and five (plus intervention by Time Warner's CableCard support group) to get a Multistream card installed on my HD TiVo. In addition, the customer service people were clueless when it came to placing my order. Further, it took a few billing cycles to get them to remove the charges for "Navigator" service from my bill.

Do you think they are being clueless or just purposefully incompetent to force you to rent the higher cost STB?