Shopping for TV services

By Adam Engst

When it comes to deciding where to turn for the signals that display on your television set, today’s viewers have a growing and broad set of options to choose from. In general, there are three kinds of TV sources to which viewers can turn, two of which are available only to those willing to pay for such service. Table 1 summarizes these options and explains briefly how they work and what kinds of signals and content they include. After that, we’ll dig into the differences among these offerings and explain what’s involved in viewing high-definition television (HDTV) versus the more standard variety (SDTV).

Table 1: Broadcast, Cable, Satellite, and Internet TV

Type	Cost basis	Brief explanation
Broadcast	free	Over the air broadcast SDTV and HDTV, antenna required
Cable	fee-based	Cable connection and set-top box required (HDTV costs extra)
Internet	free and fee-based	Media PC or DVR required to download and play back content; several fee-based services plus lots of free stuff
Satellite	fee-based	Orbiting satellites beam content to small dishes and play back through required set-top box (HDTV costs extra)

Basic Broadcast TV
Pros:
• Free
• Good broadcast signal quality in most metropolitan areas
• Urban areas may support a surprising number of HDTV stations
Cons:
• Commercials galore
• Limited channel selections
• Signal quality varies and can be poor in core cities

This is the TV that most people over 40 grew up with: rabbit ears on top of the set, and three or more channels picked up “over the air” (OTA) in most major metropolitan areas. Today, however, it’s not unusual to get 30 or more channels in major metro areas, and you can often pick up 5 or more HDTV channels over the air at no additional cost. That said, a new antenna is needed to pick up OTA HDTV, but decent antennas may be purchased for under $30 and don’t need to be mounted outside the house (as an added bonus, most are compact enough to be placed unobtrusively in or around your entertainment center).

Cable TV
Pros:
• Triple-play bundles can offer big discounts
• Lots of channels to choose from, including 30 or more digital music channels from most providers,
• On-demand programming (some free, some for a fee, including movies, TV shows, sports events, and more)
• Built-in program guide and sophisticated program search and selection functions
Cons:
• Single provider in most areas
• Costs can be high
• Limited HDTV offerings but increasing

In many areas, especially outside the top 25 metropolitan markets in the US, you’ll have access to only a single cable TV provider. This turns cable TV into something of a “take it or leave it” proposition. But once taken, signing up for service is a lot like choosing a cellphone plan: you can start with basic cable coverage for about $25-30 a month, and then start adding various types of other content (HBO, ShowTime, Independent Films, Starz, and other movie packages, plus sports packages, and on and on) for various incremental monthly fees that typically run $7 a month and up. Don’t forget that you must also pay monthly rental fees for equipment, which range from $3-5 a month for basic set-top boxes and remote controls, to as high as $15 per month for HDTV-capable boxes and/or various types of digital video recorders also available from these providers. When all is said and done, many cable TV households must get used to paying monthly cable TV service bills in excess of $100 a month.

One of the compelling pluses for cable TV service, however, is the so-called triple play. For a single monthly charge you get cable TV, Internet access, and telephone service, all covered on a single monthly bill. Rates are reasonable enough to make this offering quite attractive to many households, especially those used to paying $100 or more a month for cable TV (or cable TV and Internet service) already.

For interesting comparisons or ratings of cable TV providers, you can find useful information at opinion and ratings Web sites such as Epinions (which has a nice Top 10 page) or RateItAll (which lists 21 companies on its Cable Television Providers page, but rates only 10 of them)

Internet TV
Pros:
• Appeal to do-it-yourself types
• Lots of free content available
• Record and watch programs when you want to regardless of schedule
Cons:
• PC with video tuner and lots of storage required
• Complex setup usually required to display various video formats

Given the ability to access the Internet and download files (a task that normally requires a PC, though an increasing number of digital video recorders and media devices can also do likewise) anyone who can play back properly formatted video signals to a television (which in turn requires the right kind of graphics card and output software) can grab and watch TV programs or other video content from sources online. This aspect of Internet video is actually something of a wild frontier, in that those who are willing to learn how to negotiate these wilds and work with digital video formats to display them on their TV sets can find literally anything and everything they might wish to watch somewhere out there on the Internet. There are also an increasing number of free “video aggregators” on the Internet, such as WatchOnline.TV, that offer large numbers of channels (over 2,500 for WatchOnline.TV, for example) to their members in an effort to help viewers find and locate programming materials to match their interests.

Those inclined to take a more controlled and less labor- or learning-intensive route should be glad to discover that numerous commercial video content providers are now available online. These services generally require their own set-top boxes (but eliminate the need for a media-equipped PC, except for those who might already have one) and monthly subscription fees, but offer a mix of movies, sports, music video, and other programming to their subscribers in return, while using the Internet as the vehicle to beam content into households for eventual playback.

Because local recording and storage is part and parcel of how such service works, it’s not unreasonable to subscription Internet TV as a digital recording/content delivery service that’s comparable to cable TV with a digital video recorder, except that it’s cheaper and comes with a more eclectic mix of content from which to choose. For Internet TV, the presumption is that subscribers watch what they want when they want, rather than sitting down Sunday nights at 7 PM to watch the latest episode of “The Sopranos” (to use a well-known example from the cable TV world). Companies involved in this game include ManiaTV, Akimbo Systems, Prison Planet.TV, and many others, with cable and telecom providers (including the likes of Time Warner, Cox, and AT&T) mounting Internet based offerings to compete for their share of this market as well.

Satellite TV
Pros:
• Wide range of channels and content of all kinds
• Generally more HDTV channels and content than cable TV providers currently offer
• Available in rural areas with southern exposure
Cons:
• Included fees for set-top boxes typical
• Bad weather can degrade signal quality
• Additional home wiring issues to connect to roof-top dish

In the satellite TV world, signals are beamed from ground-based (terrestrial) stations to relays in stationary geosynchronous orbits (which, in plain English means, they don’t move relative to any line of sight on the earth’s surface). People who subscribe to satellite TV services get small dish antennas that they point at these satellites, and one they’re properly aligned, can pick up whatever the provider who feeds the satellite its signals has to offer. Subscribers generally also need a set-top box for each TV set they wish to feed with satellite signals that they can then watch. Cable TV subscribers generally buy these boxes, however, and thus don’t have to pay perpetual monthly fees to use their equipment once they’ve purchased what they want (though they do have to buy occasional upgrade gear, as when seeking to add support for HDTV content).

As with cable TV, subscribers get a base channel package for a basic subscription fee, and can then add movies, sports, and other content by paying additional monthly fees. Again as with cable TV, satellite subscribers can also watch pay-per-view content by working with the access interface to pay for one-shot or limited-access viewing for specific kinds of content (usually, movies or sporting events).

Owning rather than renting equipment is an advantage to some as well. Finally, satellite service is available anyplace you can put a dish on the ground that can “see” a working satellite (cable service is available only in areas where the cable company has run its lines).

Numerous rating services also rate satellite providers, so you’ll find the Satellite Television Providers page at RateItAll, and the Satellite TV Providers page at Choice Review of great interest in learning who’s in this game, and who plays it best.

Choosing What’s Best for You

When it comes to picking the services and offerings that work best for you and your family, we have a little advice to dispense. If you live in an area served by one or more cable companies, consider the various triple play offerings that may be available to you. These will generally save money when compared to the added costs of telephone service, Internet access, and TV service. If you family wants or needs all three, this will very often prove to be the best deal. If you live outside a cable TV service area or satellite offerings are competitive enough to get the edge (right now, many satellite companies are offering free equipment in exchange for subscription commitments of 2-3 years; because you need to pay for service anyway, this is one heck of a deal) where you live, satellite may otherwise win out over cable anway. HDTV aficionados will probably lean more toward satellite anyway because it currently offers more (and some would argue, better) HDTV than cable.

But whatever you do, don’t forget to hook up SDTV and HDTV antennas to your set(s) to see what’s up on the local airwaves. And if you are inclined to dig into the enormous wealth of TV and video material available on the Internet—either free or for a fee—don’t forget to scope out what kinds of content that’s available online that you can watch on your TV at home, either.

Check out our other article here about TV programming choices.

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