Saturday, November 29, 2008

Comcast Makes Cable TV a Realistic Option

By Rachel Smith

When you look at all of the TV service providers out there, it can be pretty intimidating when you think about choosing one. After all, there's lots of different propaganda about which one is the best. The good news is that Comcast can supply you with a wide range of choices of digital cable TV.

Digital TV is one of the best things that's happened to TV since color was added back in the nineteen sixties. That's because digital TV provides a much better picture than the old fashioned analog TV signals and also provides the same high quality of sound that comes from compact discs. Digital TV also allows meta-information to be provided along with the programming that you watch so that you can read up on each show through an on screen program guide and set parental controls (both of which are included with all of Comcast's programming packages) to keep your kids from watching whatever programming that you deem inappropriate. All of these features of digital TV make it so attractive that the government has mandated that all TV broadcasts will have to switch over to the digital format in 2009.

Comcast also offers HDTV which is another major development in TV technology. While many people think that HDTV and digital TV are one and the same, HDTV is actually a form of digital TV. All HDTV programming is digital but not all digital TV is high definition. Just the same, Comcast will bring you HDTV programming on several different channels so that you can watch movies the way they were meant to be viewed in the theater and enjoy a variety of other types of programming with the high resolution picture, wide screen aspect ratio, and Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound that only HDTV can provide.

One thing that Comcast does a great job of providing you with is sports. Many satellite TV providers claim to have a monopoly on specialty sports broadcasting, but Comcast has recently made inroads into that area by offering seasonal sports subscriptions along with its other programming. Seasonal Sports Subscriptions are special channels that you pay for on an individual basis which provide you with coverage of all of the games throughout the regular season of the sport of your choice. For example, if you subscribe to MLB Extra Innings, you'll be able to watch every major league baseball game over the course of baseball's regular season. Same thing with Basketball with NBA League Pass or for hockey with NHL Center Ice.

Comcast can also provide you with a digital video recorder. Digital video recorders provide the option of automatically recording programming when you aren't at home so that you can watch it when you are at home. It's basically like a VCR, only it's easy enough to program that you'll actually want to use it. A DVR, as this device is known for short, stores all of its recordings on a built in hard disk and allows you to fast forward through advertisements when you watch the recordings. That alone makes digital video recorders very much worth while.

All of these advancements have moved cable TV from Comcast into the twenty first century. - 16089

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