Interesting read about Spectrum and Cable Cards ..

[nyplayer]

https://www.techhive.com/article/793...o-support.html

[KeithAbbott]

Ugh. Not looking forward to the day they pull the plug on cableCARD.

[nyplayer]

Channels DVR and TVE is my backup when my primes fail ...I get all my cable channels in TVE.

[KeithAbbott]

Originally Posted by nyplayer

Channels DVR and TVE is my backup when my primes fail ...I get all my cable channels in TVE.

I will probably continue to use SageTV for OTA and imported media after Spectrum pulls the plug on CableCARD. I'm finding that my family's viewing habits are starting to shift away from Cable TV to streaming services, because that's where most of the best content is being made available. I don't really want to pay for Cable TV for the privilege of only being able to solely access their content via TVE streams or their app(s), especially when I'm finding less and less worthwhile content to view on traditional cable TV. Hopefully it will still be several years before I am forced to make that choice.

[wayner]

IMO the only reason to have cable is sports. There isn't much alternative other than buying a bunch of other packages that cost as much as cable, and sometimes you have to deal with local blackouts as well.

[sic0048]

While I do look forward to faster upload speeds, I hope Spectrum finds a way to keep cable cards working too. Hopefully Spectrum still has a lot of cable boxes out there that utilize a cable card internally which will push them to find a solution that keep the cards working. If not and it's only customers like us that are renting the cards, then we can kiss them goodbye. Spectrum is not going to work very hard to keep cable cards active for the 0.0001% of customers that still rent them.

If it does goes away, I'm not sure we will keep Spectrum. The only reason we keep it now is that I can record 6 channels at once for a single $3/mo cable card rental fee and I can watch those shows on any TV/device with SageTV. We don't rent a single cable box in our house. I'm not going to spend another $50, $75, $100 on cable box rentals on top of the already expensive TV service.

[KeithAbbott]

Originally Posted by sic0048

While I do look forward to faster upload speeds, I hope Spectrum finds a way to keep cable cards working too.

Does the average residential customer really need the same upload speed as their download speed? To me, the advantage that they are claiming seems targeted toward business users, to grab business customers away from AT&T and other companies offering symmetrical internet speeds. And Spectrum will likely increase their pricing for that service offering as well.

[wayner]

Originally Posted by KeithAbbott

Does the average residential customer really need the same upload speed as their download speed? To me, the advantage that they are claiming seems targeted toward business users, to grab business customers away from AT&T and other companies offering symmetrical internet speeds. And Spectrum will likely increase their pricing for that service offering as well.

I agree. The local phone company here offers premium services with up to 3Gbps bidirectional speed. Some people will get this because they want the fastest speed. But I am guessing that almost no one has the hardware to take advantage of speeds above 1Gig.

The main reason to want fast upload speeds is if you are doing stuff like video editing at home and have to upload to the cloud.

[TGsell]

I am in the same boat as sic0048 with a similar setup I think and an investment of $1000+ in mini pcs and encoders. So far so good but we have Optimum here and they will do what they want. Hope there's enough TiVo and cable cards in their boxes to keep CC alive.

[nyplayer]

Originally Posted by KeithAbbott

Does the average residential customer really need the same upload speed as their download speed? To me, the advantage that they are claiming seems targeted toward business users, to grab business customers away from AT&T and other companies offering symmetrical internet speeds. And Spectrum will likely increase their pricing for that service offering as well.

With the ability to work from home upload speed is very necessary ... During Covid lockdowns we saw on our household how important fast uploads speeds were for remote learning working and meetings.

[trk2]

Originally Posted by wayner

The main reason to want fast upload speeds is if you are doing stuff like video editing at home and have to upload to the cloud.

Bundle your cable to share with your family and friends. I have 80mbit/s upload speed which is plenty fast for my brother to use an HD300 (and firestick) to access live cable tv (xfinity cable card) and all recordings over Sage with no transcoding needed. It's almost fast enough for Blu-ray streaming but unfortunately there are frequent interruptions. Like Wayner, I buy cable tv almost exclusively for sports and most online options like league pass are susceptible to blackout restrictions and/or the seek/skip behavior is intolerable compared to Sage.

[KeithAbbott]

Originally Posted by nyplayer

With the ability to work from home upload speed is very necessary ... During Covid lockdowns we saw on our household how important fast uploads speeds were for remote learning working and meetings.

I think at least some of this is due to inefficient applications. For example, when I conduct a remote team meeting and share a video with my team members, the video is streamed to my workstation, only to be re-uploaded back to the server and then re-downloaded back to each team member's remote workstation. If the video is directly available to the server, the application should be smart enough to stream it directly from the server to each meeting participant (myself included), without going thru the initial download/upload rigmarole.

So to kill off a viable technology that has been used for a decade or two, so that customers can get additional bandwidth that sits unused for 90% of the time, seems unfortunate to me. Spectrum has a history of forcing things like this down their customers throats, whether they need it or not. I could get by with less than 200mbps download speed, but that is their minimum offering take-it-or-leave-it. And I don't think that choice is due to technology limitations, but was instituted based on marketing and profit motivations.

[sic0048]

Originally Posted by KeithAbbott

Does the average residential customer really need the same upload speed as their download speed? To me, the advantage that they are claiming seems targeted toward business users, to grab business customers away from AT&T and other companies offering symmetrical internet speeds. And Spectrum will likely increase their pricing for that service offering as well.

We have Spectrum 200mbps service which is 200mbps download but only 20mbps upload (which is the theoretical max - it actually performs much lower than that - usually around 5-10mpbs). I have a full time VPN connection between my house and my parents house (who have the same speed service) and regularly transfer files (backups) and CCTV video streams over the VPN. So yes, having faster upload speeds would definitely be welcome.

[KeithAbbott]

Originally Posted by sic0048

We have Spectrum 200mbps service which is 200mbps download but only 20mbps upload (which is the theoretical max - it actually performs much lower than that - usually around 5-10mpbs). I have a full time VPN connection between my house and my parents house (who have the same speed service) and regularly transfer files (backups) and CCTV video streams over the VPN. So yes, having faster upload speeds would definitely be welcome.

Wow, that sounds like a great use case for you and your parents. But you definitely do not represent the average residential customer.

[tvmaster2]

Originally Posted by KeithAbbott

Ugh. Not looking forward to the day they pull the plug on cableCARD.

Nor am I - five TiVo’s in my stable…

Remember who did this - Ajit Pai, appointed by….

[Zogg]

I received an ominous survey from Spectrum about 6 months ago so this doesn't surprise me at all.

I have 2 CableCards with HDHR Primes so possibly I will be okay, but I need them as I can't quite get all the locals OTA due to distance and terrain.

A while back I worked on an EventGhost-AutoIt script method to use a web browser on a PC as a live tuner, but it wasn't totally reliable since the Spectrum web page doesn't make it easy to get to a particular channel. There's also a delay and limits on the number of streams among other issues. Might be time to start working the kinks out of it, though, just in case.

[phelme]

Originally Posted by wayner

IMO the only reason to have cable is sports. There isn't much alternative other than buying a bunch of other packages that cost as much as cable, and sometimes you have to deal with local blackouts as well.

yes, because the world we have now is much better, with 17 apps that have no relation to each other to stream stuff. (of course I'm old )

just curious where Comcast is on all this...

[Malfunction]

Originally Posted by wayner

IMO the only reason to have cable is sports. There isn't much alternative other than buying a bunch of other packages that cost as much as cable, and sometimes you have to deal with local blackouts as well.

I'm not into sports so much, but I like to record stuff from the cable. If I could trick a Roku into changing the channel by a signal from SageTV, I could probably go full stream.

[nyplayer]

Video by Lon siedman ....

https://youtu.be/GOKCEUC8nQY

[AlphaCrew]

Once Verizon drops CC, I think I'll be dropping Verizon and finally moving to one of these new fangled streaming services..