One box to rule them all...

Perhaps the most beautiful thing about digital technology is that there is nearly no lost data transmission quality. That is what confuses me about "digital cable television." Cable companies are responsible for easily the worst, but most widely used, and most expensive, system and interface I can think of. And guess what? It's totally redundant.

Easily the weakest component of anyone's home theater is their cable box. For a very long time, my family never had a cable box; as long as the connection was good, our TVs could pick up the analog signal just fine. Jump to modern times: in order to receive the channels we pay over $60 a month for, we are forced to use a large black box that makes changing the channel take 30 seconds, adjusting the volume slower, and displays a 480i signal that has clearly been compressed. Pressing the menu button on my home cable box results in a minute long process to bring up an interactive schedule with poor response time and low resolution. On top of that, in the segments on channels that are for local advertising, we are constantly bombarded with commercials about just how magical our cable service is, and just how dumb telephone and satellite companies are. Clearly the cable executives are blind to just how much potential their service actually does have.

The hidden strength of cable service is that every TV bought ALREADY HAS A TUNER! Usually, your TV's built in tuner is of much higher quality than that of the cable box, and has a both quicker and snappier interface. So if the cable executive's stopped to think for even one second, they would realize that they could remove the entire cost of building, selling, and maintaining their horrible cable boxes, while continuing to collect over $60 a month from many of their customers. Additionally, if they converted to a purely ASTC based signal (hopefully one compatible with the government subsidized boxes for older TVs), they'd be able to transmit everything in HD and maybe even save bandwidth, which could be dedicated to all of their other services. I think they'd be surprised at how effective a simpler interface and higher quality service would be at keeping customers.

-Tom