Cable Tech Talk

On Tuesday, the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and Internet will hold a hearing titled “State of Rural Communications” to examine the successes and challenges that companies face serving rural consumers.

The cable industry has long recognized that quality broadband services are crucial drivers of economic development in communities large and small.  When cable delivers broadband to small communities, it’s what links them to the rest of the country and the world, creates jobs, improves educational opportunities, and delivers health care more efficiently.

The smell of the grass, the crack of the bat, and an almost unbelievable number of baseballs. Let’s kick off the 2013 season with this week’s #broaddata showing off some pretty staggering stats on how many balls we’ll see go smoking over the plate.

With literally thousands of games to watch, isn’t it nice to know all of them will be shown on cable?

When you turn your cable box on, what you’re really doing is opening up a secure gateway for data. You’re allowing every cable channel, every feature film, and all on-demand programming into your home. The technology behind it doesn’t matter to most, but we think it’s pretty interesting especially as trends are evolving.

The current format in which your cable box receives television data is called QAM, which stands for quadrature amplitude modulation. It’s really just a method for transmitting digital information that your cable box can understand, and then transmit to your TV.

A new study by Motorola recently revealed some interesting trends about multi-screen and time-shifting technology and highlighted our voracious appetite for video on every device, platform and location available.  This is the kind of data that we love to sink our teeth into.

One interesting nugget that the study revealed was that 41 percent of content recorded on digital video recorders in the U.S. is never watched, suggesting that we are “the most wasteful content marketplace”. This may at first sound tragic, but it really isn’t and is probably best categorized under the “first world problems” complaint banner.