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Big Apple Day
Residents on Long Island are learning what Cablevision subscribers in Bronx, Brooklyn, and Connecticut have known for a few years now — if you want to watch Cablevision’s TV lineup, be prepared to shell out almost $7 a month for every television in your home.
It’s part of Cablevision’s march to an all-digital, encrypted cable lineup. If you want cable TV, you’ll need to lease one of Cablevision’s digital set top boxes or CableCARD devices.
Cablevision says it will provide customers with free boxes for their televisions for the first year, available in limited quantities at Optimum stores or shipped free to your door by UPS. But after 12 months, customers with several TV’s will find steep increases to their monthly bills, just to cover boxes many don’t want in the first place.
“It’s just more gouging from Cablevision,” writes our reader Stephanie who lives in Lindenhurst, N.Y. “We used to watch television box-free at the kitchen table or on the computer with our Slingbox, but now our home will need three more boxes when we already pay them $14 for the two we already have.”
Cablevision's Conversion Schedule for Western Long Island
For customers like Stephanie, that adds up to nearly $35 a month just in equipment fees.
“Our bill is already $170 a month and next year it will probably run over $200 with the boxes we don’t want and whatever their next rate increase turns out to be,” she writes.
Cablevision claims they are not doing anything their competition isn’t.
“In fact, every other TV service provider in the New York metropolitan area already requires digital boxes for each TV,” a Cablevision spokesman stressed.
Those upset with the change are considering making some changes themselves — some by switching to a promotional package from satellite TV or Verizon’s FiOS.
“I am well aware they both want you to use boxes on those services as well, but for a year or two, we could probably knock $30 or more a month off our current cable bill with a promotional deal,” Stephanie says.
What about after the deal expires?
“We’ll just switch back to Cablevision on one of their promotional deals,” she says. “For this family, it’s about the ‘total amount due’ at the bottom of the bill.”
Cablevision’s ongoing transition to digital caused panic when it blanked out broadcast basic cable service for more than 500 residents of a Coney Island complex housing numerous senior citizens, almost all watching local television signals delivered in analog. When Cablevision made the digital switch in August, every local channel suddenly disappeared. The NY Post explained what happened next:
Despite the best efforts of property managers to inform the elderly residents of the Luna Park Houses and the Warbasse Houses about the change, some of them just didn’t get the message.
“It was hell trying to explain this to the elderly people,” said Rochelle Captan, the manager of the Warbasse houses.
“Everyone in the Luna Houses — we think we’re the chosen ones, we don’t have to convert to digital,” said Fikret Deljanin, the property manager of the Luna Park Houses. “I don’t understand the ignorance — we’re just an ignorant population, I guess.”
Both Deljanin and Captan said they had called in favors with Cablevision to keep the analog service going as long as possible — and that now they were having to call in another favor to get some free conversion boxes delivered to calm disgruntled elderly residents.
But Joe M. said many elderly residents — including his mother — are feeling betrayed and confused.
“My mother wants her channels 3, 10 and 12, that’s it. Now the seniors are told they have to get a converter box — I don’t mind that — but my mother is 87! She doesn’t know anything about this!”
And now, it’s simply a matter of picking up the pieces and trying to move on … over to the couch to watch this afternoon’s episode of “Murder She Wrote.”
Cablevision also announced this week it had upgraded its set top boxes to support several new applications and services on the way. Multichannel News covered the story:
Cablevision Systems has now deployed Zodiac Interactive’s interactive TV platform — including support for the industry’s EBIF specification — across the MSO’s entire New York-area footprint serving 2.9 million digital cable subscribers.
The operator is using Zodiac’s PowerUp framework software, running on Cisco Systems’ native set-top box environment, to run several interactive applications and services. These include iO TV Shortcuts, search, an enhanced program guide, video-on-demand navigation and dedicated ITV channels.
The companies also are working together on Cablevision’s remote-storage DVR — which the operator has been planning to launch this year — and the MSO is using Zodiac’s PowerUp Advanced Messaging Solution (AMS) software to integrate Web and mobile applications with set-top boxes.
Some other families are considering a different change.
“Maybe we just should stop watching TV in the kitchen,” Dominick Galletta of East Northport, N.Y., told WNBC-TV.
[flv width=”597″ height=”356″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WNBC New York No Cable Box No TV for You on Long Island 9-16-10.flv[/flv]
WNBC-TV covers frustrated Cablevision customers on Long Island now forced to obtain digital cable boxes for every television in their home. (2 minutes)
So why doesn’t CV use DTAs?
Also, analog cell phones are gone. Analog OTA TV is gone. Cable is the only way you can get analog TV anymore. It’s natural to kill analog because for every analog channel you reclaim you get as many as ten standard-def or three high-def channels…
Drop cable all together. You won’t really miss it anyway.
Enough. You don’t have to be a victim.
In the movie “The Magnificent Seven”, the bandit chief exclaims (during the sack of the village) “If the Lord did not want them sheared, he would not have made them sheep!”
There’s a magical piece of metal you can stick in the air and pick up TV for free. It’s called an antenna. An ATSC-ready TV or digital converter box are relatively inexpensive compared to a $200 monthly cable bill.
Tell the cable companies where to stick their box.
I am a former Cablevision employee. I have never bashed the company before, but I would like to say that Cablevision is definitely gouging. When I was working for them, they told us that the reason channels were being moved to digital (AKA you need a box to watch them) was to increase space so they could add more HD channels to compete with the strong HD lineups of Verizon and the satellite companies. I now live in upstate NY and Time Warner Cable offers somewhere around 100 HD channels, yet you can still receive over 70 channels without a… Read more »
If you really are an ex-cablevision employee why are you posting a clickbank referral link? What’s the kickback for people signing up for that…
Perhaps your reading comprehension skills are a little off, so I’ll elaborate. If you read between the lines, it’s pretty easy to infer that: A.) As a former Cablevision employee, I was in SALES and B.) As a former employee, I am currently unemployed… Now, I’m not going to go as far as to say that Cablevision tricked me into resigning from sales, meanwhile promising me a job in another department… Yet then when I actually resigned and asked about the other opportunity… they told me that the best way to get the other job was to “apply online at… Read more »
Satellite TV on PC Scam
If you’re going to spam more referral links, here’s another one for people to made an educated decision about that scam of a service.
MDouble, you are a con artist. Just as you conned Cablevision customers when “you worked for them”, now you’re a con artist for Satellite TV for PC. Don’t click the link, IT’S A SCAM.
I suppose it’s only natural to see the loss of some analog channels, but not all of them for the current time. As Ian L already mentioned, Analog is on the way out. Analog Cell phones stop being produced ages ago, now such service no longer exists. Digital TV, while shorter in range and more picky about signal quality, is the only thing left standing. “Analog” or should I say Non-encrypted satellite went away years ago and that is now digital/encrypted. Time Warner in the past few months as reported on this website did take away some analog channels, moving… Read more »
We were told that if we had a QAM tuner we would still get service though not all the channels and features. Once the fipped the switch we got NOTHING but the blue screen.
The fact that Cablevision is charging for the digital boxes is actually with industry standards. Working at DISH Network I have to keep up on all providers. The Difference is where almost all providers charge you for the first two tv’s DISH Network doesn’t, saving you up to 14.00 a month.
put an antenna on your roofs!
I had Dish TV which was fine, but no high speed internet available, so I am stuch with Cablevision. I will say their phone service has been flawless.
We just purchased a Samsung with an ATSC/Clear QAM tuner and receive all the basic cable channels just fine. No box!!!