Monday, August 30, 2010

Cable tv's to move from analog to digital to fight illegal connection [update]

3 comments
3 popular cable tv provider in the philippines
The Philippine Cable TV association is pushing the cable tv providers in our country to move from analog cable transmission to digital platform to fight illegal connection and to catch the lost revenue from it.

According to Jose Lobregat, PCTA chairman, signal theft is very rampant that they estimated that there is one to one ratio between paying cable subscribers and illegal or tapped cable tv connections. The estimated value lost annually because of illegal connection is P6.3 billion pesos.

We know that movement from analog to digital provides many advantage similar to how analog signal and digital signal for phone lines are. Digital signal means



1. more bandwidth, more subscribers can be connected to a single lane which results to cheaper operating cost for the provider and cheaper bills for the consumer
2. noise reduction algorithms / error correction , which results to higher quality streams
3. Better authorization and authentication, illegal connection won't work if no equivalent ID is existing.
4. Digital equipments are easier to maintain and upgrade, better quality of service.

Digitization of cable is not a question of whether to do it or not but when.

SkyCable has already invested in cable digitalization and is now offering improved picture quality (I also believe they are the only cable tv provider in the Philippines that offers HD channels currently-correct me if I'm wrong).

By the way, for the record:

SkyCable is more like a premium cable tv provider, they cost more to subscribe to but has better quality of streams. They offer other plans that suits the subcriber's needs.
Global Destiny aka Destiny cable on the other hand is more of cable tv for the mass, which offers the best value for money when it comes to bill versus the highly coveted channels. (This is what we used and I think this is the easiest cable tv to tap with.)
CableLink on the other hand is a wireless cable tv provider which utilizes prepaid system where in they give you a digital box and a satellite dish receiver. To be able to use their cable tv you must buy a prepaid card from them and insert it to the digital box. This is the cable tv we used at the office and i notice that if the weather is strong, it highly affects the quality of the stream.


Update: There's a facebook fanpage that supports the spread of Digital TV to filipinos. Check out their page.

3 comments:

JoeWilko said...

People who were able to steal through analog cableconnections are going to be able to do it on digital cable. The only difference is now they will be able to do it cleaner and more efficiently. Better, more advanced technology always brings a better, more advanced way to bypass its security.

Hihey said...

But i believe its more difficult to do than in analog. cause in analog cable connection, you only have to splice some wires on the main wire then run it through your home but for digital cable you need to use some sort of digibox to decode the signal.

Warning_h20 said...

@Cablelinkmanila1
malapit na mag digital ang cablelink this year.