Going Ahead with CableCards
Called Oceanic Cable, Hawaii’s Time Warner cable company, and started the process to get CableCards for my Tivo. This is supposed to provide HDTV channels of local stations for $3.10 a month to rent the CableCard. Not much, but I wanted to try it out.
Even though Oceanic is migrating to Switched Digital Video (SDV), they don’t yet have the tuning adapters needed to view these HD-migrated channels. This Time Warner SDV page only leads me to the generic Oceanic web site without details of SDV. The customer rep I talked to didn’t have any other details either.
October 21, 2008 @ 8:06 am
so the cable card is so that you don’t need to rent a cable box? cable card can be rented for $3 versus $20 for cable box? is this the idea?
October 22, 2008 @ 7:52 am
The cable card is cheaper than the cable box; however, if I’m not mistaken, with the cable card, you won’t be able to access some of the “on demand” type feature or interaction. At least this was the case the other year.
October 25, 2008 @ 9:15 pm
There are a few gotchas with this. If you want all the services Oceanic provides, you NEED to rent their cable box. Since I have a capable Tivo and don’t want music channels, pay per view, on demand, or even a ton of premium channels, I can go for the CableCard for HD content.
But, Oceanic’s switch to SDV makes CableCards worthless. The new SDV tuning adapters are coming out to CableCard customers to get SDV content so I hope by going with CableCards now, I can get an SDV tuning adapter when released and get HD channels cheaper.