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Cisco 170HD DTA
Time Warner Cable customers in greater New York will soon need set-top boxes or CableCARD technology to keep watching cable television.
The cable operator will be dropping analog television service, starting in Mount Vernon, Staten Island, and Bergen County, N.J. with much of the rest of the downstate region switched over the summer.
Cable television customers who already use Time Warner Cable set-top boxes, including DVRs, will not notice any change. Customers that plug a cable directly into the back of a television will need to take steps to keep their video service working after the digital conversion.
Time Warner’s digital switch will also disable viewing on televisions equipped with a QAM tuner. Cable operators now have the power to encrypt their entire television lineup.
The company is mailing letters to affected television subscribers advising them to get a Time Warner Cable DVR, traditional set-top box, CableCARD or Digital Adapter (DTA). For secondary televisions, Time Warner’s new DTA for downstate New York is the Cisco DTA 170HD, which supports both High Definition and Standard Definition channels and digital-only QAM tuning up to 1GHz. This model is also capable of providing HD premium channels, which are currently not available to customers with earlier generation DTAs. It is unknown if Time Warner will support that functionality.
Time Warner is making DTA units available to customers at no charge through the end of next year. Effective Jan. 1, 2015 each DTA box will cost $0.99 a month.
The company says the digital conversion will open extra bandwidth on the cable system to support more video on demand, HD channels, and faster broadband. Each 6MHz analog channel will make room for 10-12 digital channels, three digital HD channels, or an extra 40Mbps of download speed, according to Time Warner’s blog.
Residential customers can get DTA boxes as follows:
- through the website at www.TWC.com/digitaladapter
- via the telephone at 1-855-286-1736
- in-person at a local TWC store
- have a tech visit and install it
[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/TWC Digital Conversion NYC 4-29-13.mp4[/flv]
Time Warner Cable produced this video to explain the digital conversion, who needs to get ready, and how. (2 minutes)
These conversions are going to confuse the hell out of people. He states, it makes the signal work with your old television. Well, many people bought new sets with digital tuners for the OTA digital conversion. They are going to expect them to work with these digital signals as well.