Voom should enable OTA permanently!
- Thread starter barth2k
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Ah the foresight of buying a set with a built in HDTV tuner and getting OTA without subscribing to any service when VOOM goes and if D* would go I would still have OTA where most of the primetime shows are HD and NFL and NASCAR etc......
A program guide comes in handy on a tuner. The OTA spec transmits a program guide, but it appears that Voom transmits their own and uses the satellite guide to tell the receivers what is on each channel - not the OTA received guide information. Have your customers who deactivated and continued to watch OTA via a Voom receiver left their Voom dish connected and if not, did they lose their EPG?T2k said:
When the satellite guide ceases will the program information be received OTA? Or will the receiver become a dumb tuner (no EPG) when the last of the satellite guide information expires.
When someone moves their Voom box to another part of the country, will a simple rescan of locals give them their channels and local EPG - or does that also require a hit from Voom? Will the box even tune channels not in its authorized area?
It is important to know this as Voom won't be there to make the changes to people's boxes after April 30th. Voom won't be there to transmit EPGs for OTA. From all reports, the tuners will work but probably won't work 100% correctly.
The value of the box after April 30th depends on the box's ability to find new channels added to the market it is in, be portable to a different market (including new channels) and be able to update the EPG from OTA sources.
JL
justalurker said:
Althought it might be totally different technology, my RCA DTC-100 still works great as an OTA HD receiver. I got it WAY back when D* first offered their HD package. So far back that they didn't charge anything for the 'package' (since it only had like 2 channels)! Anyways, it still works AND I get a channel guide too. Perhaps this is just an an exception, but it would explain why the DTC-100 still sells for up to $200 on ebay.
Lobstah said:
You are correct. Neither one of my HD sets have built-in ATSC tuners, just the old NTSC tuner. Luckily I do have 2 other ATSC STB tuners that I can use if I want to go back to OTA only... I started to sell the ATSC STB's after I got V* but I am glad that I kept them packed away in the closet now that V* is going away!
I've decided that I am not going to count on Voom's receiver to keep working after the 30th. In a couple of weeks I will get myself the highly rated LG 4200A and so I won't depend upon an iffy ota receiver that cannot be updated, ugraded, or supported. If it works fine, if not, well I'm covered. In the last few months I have had enough of Voom uncertainty to last a long time.
The OTA signal doesn't come from the satellite. It comes from broadcast towers in your local area, and is sent via the UHF band to an antenna on your roof, which is connected to your VOOM rcvr. They are two seperate signals coming in to the same box, and they are independent of each other. So when the sat goes dark, the OTA should still work.
Lob
Lob
Lobstah said:
Not necessarily...while watching an OTA channel, pull the access card for the receiver and you see that the receiver gets upset with you. Now this could just mean that the receiver needs an access card present in order to run or it could mean that is actually needs to read data from the access card in order for OTA to work. If the latter is true and the required data on the card "expires" and voom doesn't do anything stop that, then OTA will not work once voom ceases to transmit and the required data is not refreshed.
Until we hear from a definitive source or May 1st (perhaps even a few weeks later, we really don't know if the OTA tuner will work or not. Now if someone has a voom receiver that is no longer active (e.g. not part of a subscription) and it it able to tune OTA, but not get the sat signals then I'd say we're in good shape as far as the receiver still functioning as a tuner. But with new 5th gen VSB tuner chips coming out (able to receive signals better than previous gen chips according to reports), I doubt many of us will keep (if we can keep) these as are primary HD OTA tuners for too long.
That is eactly what it means. The receiver needs an access card present for OTA to work. Taking the card out is sort of like taking out a transitor out of a circut board. You won't see or hear anything because a link in the "electronic chain" has been broken.
In the receiver status menus you can see the type of "subscription" for the channel tuned to. SWO is the "code" for channels you subscribe to, there is a code you usually see with locals, but I don't remember off hand what it is. The card needs to be inplace so that the receiver can determine which channels to decode based on their code.
There are some that have claimed that the OTA has been working weeks and months without the presence of a satellite signal. I'm inclined to believe those claims. I once had a week with the sat disconnected (I wanted to rewire the house) and received OTA fine.
I agree that we need to hear from someone that has deactivated VOOM, but disconnected the satellite before the deactivation was sent and tell us if they are still receiving OTA.
In the receiver status menus you can see the type of "subscription" for the channel tuned to. SWO is the "code" for channels you subscribe to, there is a code you usually see with locals, but I don't remember off hand what it is. The card needs to be inplace so that the receiver can determine which channels to decode based on their code.
There are some that have claimed that the OTA has been working weeks and months without the presence of a satellite signal. I'm inclined to believe those claims. I once had a week with the sat disconnected (I wanted to rewire the house) and received OTA fine.
I agree that we need to hear from someone that has deactivated VOOM, but disconnected the satellite before the deactivation was sent and tell us if they are still receiving OTA.
The cost to manufacture a converter box is around $30 wholesale.
It will cost atleast $45 to send out an installer to pick up the receivers, and if they send out pre-paid boxes they will probably have atleast $15/$20 into each receiver.
Unless they already got a buyer for the equipment, more than likely it will sit in a warehouse and cost even more money to store and pay someone to do an inventory and figure out who returned their equipment and who has not.
But this is just like a computer, how long are the boxes good for until something better is released to replace it?
Its like when I beta tested Starband, they sent me a 500 MHZ Dell Computer running windows 98 and a celeron processor. By the time the program was over the computer was worthless and they told me to keep it.
IMHO, the Voom boxes are pieces of crap compaired to some of the stuff out there by DISH Network and Directv. Nobody in their right mind is gonna waste their time trying to retrieve equipment from customers homes.
Even Primestar, if im not mistaken at the end they stopped picking up converter boxes also!
It will cost atleast $45 to send out an installer to pick up the receivers, and if they send out pre-paid boxes they will probably have atleast $15/$20 into each receiver.
Unless they already got a buyer for the equipment, more than likely it will sit in a warehouse and cost even more money to store and pay someone to do an inventory and figure out who returned their equipment and who has not.
But this is just like a computer, how long are the boxes good for until something better is released to replace it?
Its like when I beta tested Starband, they sent me a 500 MHZ Dell Computer running windows 98 and a celeron processor. By the time the program was over the computer was worthless and they told me to keep it.
IMHO, the Voom boxes are pieces of crap compaired to some of the stuff out there by DISH Network and Directv. Nobody in their right mind is gonna waste their time trying to retrieve equipment from customers homes.
Even Primestar, if im not mistaken at the end they stopped picking up converter boxes also!
Claude Greiner said:
This is completely wrong, you are obviously don't know anything about these boxes whatsoever.
FYI: Voom boxes are READY for future MPEG4 upgrade, unlike ANY DTV or Dish box out there. If anything else not, this feature immediately makes them much more interesting than any other non-DVR boxes.
Stop spreading false information.
Claude Greiner said:
Primestar used MPEG 1.5 and outdated encription. When they went out of business the technology was so old no one used it. Someone did find a way to modify the old Primestar boxes to receive 1 channel if you were willing to goto the lengths to get that one channel. Even that channel stoped using the old stuff.
Unlike the VOOM receiver which can be modified to work with other satellite services. There are menus in the VOOM box that allows Symbol Rates, Polarity, FEC, Transponder Frequency, and Coding to be changed. I've never seen a D* or E* receiver have that capability.
As far as I remember Claude is an E* subscriber and doesn't have VOOM.
With all that being true, there is still a substantial cost involved in attempting to retrieve the boxes. It costs money, period. The postage is just the tip of the iceburg. I don't know what the actual cost of a "new" box is, but if it's under $300, which it most likely is, then it would be cheaper/easier/better to buy the new boxes, period.
That being said, it's entirely possible that some wholesaler/liquidator bid $50/box for every box returned. So if the postage is $25, great. But if someone refuses to "mail it in" and demands that someone comes to pick it up? Ain't going to happen, imho.
Lob
That being said, it's entirely possible that some wholesaler/liquidator bid $50/box for every box returned. So if the postage is $25, great. But if someone refuses to "mail it in" and demands that someone comes to pick it up? Ain't going to happen, imho.
Lob
The only way that Cablevision is sure to abandon recovering the STBs is if every subscriber insists that voom removes their dish while their collecting the STBs or refuses to return the STB until they have removed the dish. Of course this will not ensure that the OTA tuner will remain activated but the cost of collecting these STBs will shoot well beyond what they are worth.
as long as i can get OTA who cares about the guide--i know whats on TV GUIDE,USA TODAY etc..now can anyone answer --is it a must to have your box disconnected because if so..who knows when and how many times they will "hit" it to deactivate it??.maybe there is no deactivation just no broadcast from sat so no need to ZAP box since the SAT is zapped???
