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Choose Cable Channels

Do you think you should be able to get the Cable Channels you want rather than having it chosen on your behalf?

EDITORIAL: CLEANING UP TELEVISION

The head of the Federal Communications Commission has been saying a lot of good things lately. One is that he believes cable companies should allow their customers to pick and choose which channels they wish to receive. The other is that cable and satellite networks need to clean up their sleazy shows or else.
Ref. https://deseretnews.com

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Leave it to the FCC. The FCC is in reality, the only intity that has any power of a cable provider. A good friend of mine and myself are opening a cable system in the small town of Blomberg TX. We are very near the point of running cable to homes and actually turning people on. We have all of our equipment in place as well as 90% of our contracts with the broadcasting networks. About the article:

While this is a good idea, and is easily theorized, the amount of equipment needed per home would be enormous. The theory of cable transmissions is a complete broadcast to everything that touched the cable lines. Therefore, for each channel that you wish to exclude from a home on a standard cable system(not digital) you must install what is known as a trap. A trap in reality simply eliminates a certain frequency from the cable signal on the poll before it enters your home. Digital technologies does help to accommodate this by using a digital encoder to allow only certain channels to be decoded.

How in today's society, with so many things that have become acceptable over the last 10 years can he even suggest to do this? This would dramatically hurt a lot of networks as well as cable providers. Today's society in general I believe is to the point that the mature nature of most progaming is what gets the networks the ratings that they get. These ratings turn into dollars for the networks when it becomes time for a corporation to advertise during times of peak ratings. These networks have a relationship with each and every cable provider to air these channels. The provider is more than happy to in most cases since this is apparently what people are wanting to watch.
In defence of cable providers, myself being one, MOST channels that air explicit or questionable material are not on a basic cable tier. Which mean a person much choose a package above the standard cable package to receive such channels. (Most not all. Can't censor everything unfortunately)....... Does everyone remember the old fiberglass 3 meter satellite dishes that spun around every time you changed channels? With this technology if someone cared to use it, you can order programing as a consumer on an "a la carte". You have to live with a large dish in your hard and slow channel changes but the option is there and is actually very very cheap.(for anyone that may be interested.)

*Irritated* - I have yet to come upon a cable provider, out of very large numbers that I have spoken to while building my system, that would not or did not offer some form of education on their equipment and the technology there within. As a parent, a simply telephone call or a quick stop into your local cable office, someone there would be more than happy to not only explain but also demonstrate the technologies that are available to audit television programs specifically or an entire channel.

At this comment, everyone can just hang it up. We just banned news stations from being able to report on world or local events.

Does this make a person a bad parent that takes their child to Wal-mart if they pass by an individual that curses? What about the clothing lines that are out today? Does this mean we can't be in a public place because a woman wearing a questionable outfit might show up at the park?

It is a parents responsibility to educate, care for, and protect their children. The world is unfortunately a very bad place, but we all live in it and have to live with it.

Edited: bwren on 4th Dec, 2005 - 7:14pm