Digital Cable's Flaws Aren't Likely to Be Worked Out Soon, Experts Say
Source: The News & Observer
Publication date: 2001-05-19
May 19--Chuck Davis likes to watch nature shows on TV, but for the past seven months, ever since he got digital cable, the colors on all the sky shots get blotchy. The picture freezes, too. And sometimes the flesh tones on the screen are so scrambled that actors look like cartoons.
Somehow, this didn't feel like the new video revolution.
"One technician came out, scratched his head and said he had it at his house, too," said the Cary homeowner. "They went through everything, including digging up my yard to replace the cable. Nothing worked."
Davis is one of Time Warner's 150,000 digital cable subscribers in a 19-county area that includes the Triangle. He upgraded his service from regular analog cable, lured both by the promise of a clearer picture with more channels, and the discount he could get for bundled Internet service over the same wire.
The distorted picture he sometimes gets was not supposed to be part of the deal.
What Davis described is as common for some digital cable customers as "snow" is for the analog cable set. Digital cable, which costs about $10 more a month, does offer a better picture. The service also includes more programming services such as CD-quality sound, on-screen menus, video on demand and parental controls.
But digital cable is not without flaws, and the kinks aren't likely to be worked out for some time, experts say.
"Overall, digital does not promise perfection," said John Gannon, technology editor for Stereophile Guide to Home Theater, a Los Angeles-based trade magazine. "There are still too many interference problems. Something as simple as where the connection hits the wall could cause the picture to degrade."
Time Warner's marketing campaign hit the Triangle full force about three years ago, pushing its new service as the answer to satellite TV's digital offerings. By the end of last year, Time Warner had more than 1.7 million digital service subscribers in the United States. About one-third of all its customers in North Carolina have made the upgrade and, according to Pat Hourigan, a vice president based in Raleigh, the company continues to sign up customers at a "violent" pace.
Part of what makes digital so attractive is that, because it travels as compressed data encoded into a series of 1s and 0s, more information can be sent down the wire, resulting in a clearer picture and a larger number of channels. The trouble is that if anything in the system is amiss, the data could get garbled. The result is what Davis saw, called "pixilation."
With a traditional analog set (to which the information travels over the broadcast spectrum), if there's a problem in the transmission caused by, say, high winds or driving rain, the TV picture might seem fuzzy. Most people know it as "snow."
Sets with digital cable are susceptible to the same problems. Bad weather could interfere with the signal on its way to Time Warner's dishes. The cable Time Warner has in place could have problems. Or the homeowner could have faulty wiring. But instead of producing snow, the picture pixilates.
"You know if you take a picture and look at it and blow it up and blow it up, and eventually you're looking at these big squares of color? That's pixilation," said Rob Steinruck, director of operations for Raleigh-based Consolidated Electronics International, a TV repair shop. "If the data is corrupted, it's only going to unencode to a certain degree, and you're looking at a corrupted version of the picture."
It usually lasts for only a few frames, though, and then new data overtake the corrupted stuff and paint a clear picture. But it can be annoying, Steinruck said, especially because the pixilated effect is foreign to customers used to seeing snow.
Nancy Dail said the problem plagued her for six weeks straight until, fed up, she canceled and went back to regular cable.
"I noticed it especially with the music channels," said Dail, who recently moved from Durham to Pittsboro. She liked listening to some of the 40 CD-quality, commercial-free music stations Time Warner offers over its digital service. But "there would be breaks in the music where you wouldn't be able to listen to a whole song," she said. "It was very sporadic. That bothered me."
That's not what caused her to cancel, though. It occurred after her attempts to order movies. "You'd be watching the movie, and all of a sudden, there would be no sounds and the screen would freeze and then 10, 15 seconds later, it would catch up."
She called. Time Warner sent someone out -- three times. "The subcontractor said he had run into this problem so many times he couldn't even count." That's all she needed to hear.
Hourigan said he could not comment on individual cases but acknowledged that there are numerous circumstances under which problems could arise. Time Warner's equipment could be faulty. The consumer could have bad or substandard wiring in the house. If the cable has been spliced, even nicked, the picture could suffer.
"It's not an ongoing, systemic problem," he said. "There's no such thing as a perfect world. We engineer it and design it for a quality of service that is extremely high in terms of reliability. But occasionally, things do happen."
-----
Excel - Greg
News 
Market Data 
Discover 
