Time Warner Cable has launched a plan to go all-digital in its New York region, a move that will set the MSO up to take advantage of new Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rules that allow the MSO to encrypt its basic TV tier.
TW Cable is starting the conversion in Mount Vernon, Staten Island and Bergen County, N.J., and expects to expand the program across its New York City region over the summer on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis, the company noted on its blog Tuesday.
Following a similar cutover completed in Maine, TW Cable will use a new breed of hi-def-capable Digital Transport Adapters (DTAs) made by Cisco Systems to convert the new digital form of its basic TV tier into analog feeds that can be viewed on older analog TV sets. Time Warner Cable said it will distribute the HD-DTAs for free for residential and business customers through the end of 2014, and charge 99 cents per month per adapter thereafter. While those DTAs do support HD programming, they don't support an upstream path, so are inherently not capable of handling video-on-demand and other two-way digital cable services.
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