When I got home today I noticed a flyer in my mailbox. With Thanksgiving approaching my first thoughts were for some upcoming seasonal sales/discounts. Unfortunately this was not the case. The flyer turned out to be a pretty warning notice from the FPB.

You know it's not a good thing when on the front page it states that what is contained will affect "ALL of our cable subscribers". From reading the lengthy 7 page flyer I find out that FPB is making the digital jump in cable. Well that can't be too bad right?

Well as I continued to read I picked up a few facts. The FPB estimates 35,000 analog TV's in it's service area. So the switch to digital will require some extra equipment. That's not that bad because the government was talking about this and offering coupons to get digital converter boxes for your tv. But wait, the federal government has nothing to do with this massive change, "There are no coupons involved" (so forget about getting this for free!), and NO tv will work without a built in QAM tuner or the FPB DTA box.

Now something doesn't sound right. They are making a change that's supposed to be good for the people but instead are offering the same channels in a new format that IS NOT HD! It is a digital signal but not HD quality (that costs extra too!).

So thanks to this seemingly unbeneficial change, we get to pay an extra $1 per month on our bill for the same channels, with no HD, no Digital music channels, no additional Digital channels from their analog package (http://www.fewpb.com/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=7m%2byG4RgeQI%3d&tabid=291), no home theater system hookups, and further limiting the use of VCR's so they can push their DVR's (which if you have one on your PC or another brand may not work if it isn't QAM certified!). What is the rationale behind the FPB expecting ALL of their customers to pay more money and get nothing for it?

The rational is simple, it's the almighty dollar. $1 is all they say per month that their DTA box will cost. While that sounds nice, remember their 35,000 analog TV sets (this doesn't include possible digital TV's that don't have a QAM certified tuner) in Frankfort. That's $35,000 a month, $420,000 a year for a seemingly cheap box!

While I do understand that time and money have been spent to get the system digitally ready, wouldn't it have made sense to build a system that utilizes what's currently available instead of something that might not even be in the nice HD LCD TV you bough from Best Buy 3 years ago? Or if it wasn't possible to do that at least make it worth everyone's while by giving them something extra for the money, not the same channels and sub par service they are already known for!

Please feel free to express your opinions. I'd love to see if I'm the only one that feels this way. But if anyone from FPB does actually read this then maybe a logical explanation could be given!

CAL