 | This articleneeds additional citations forverification. Please helpimprove this article byadding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Cable-ready" – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(April 2020) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
Cable-ready is a designation which indicates that aTV set or othertelevision-receiving device (such as aVCR orDVR) is capable of receivingcable TV without aset-top box.[1]
The term originated withanalog TV, which uses different frequencies for cable versusover-the-air. This gives more channels, and at lowerfrequencies, so that early systems did not have to be sobroadband and were therefore less expensive to build.
ForNorth American cable television frequencies,[2] theVHF channels 2 to 13 are the same, while an extra 51 cable channels exist between there and over-the-airUHF channel 14. Thus, over-the-air channel 14 can be seen on cable channel 65. Conversely, those 51 extra channels (plus an additional five inserted at 95 to 99) cannot be seen at all on a device which isnot cable-ready. A "181-channel tuner" receives 125 on cable (1 to 125), plus 10 (126 to 135) more for digital cable ready TVs, plus the 56 (14 to 69) which are not identical in both (2 to 13). Other cable channels, 0, 00 and 1, which along with channels 136-158 are ill-defined and thus rarely used, and often not included in otherwise cable-ready tuners. Those "lowest numbered" channels often reside between VHF channels four and five on HRC (harmonically related carrier) and IRC (incrementally related carrier) systems where the normally four MHz gap is increased to six MHz, wide enough for one NTSC channel. Similar situations exist in the rest of the world as well.
Another use of a cable-readytuner is for receivingamateur television (ATV) in North America, where the main ATVband appears on cable channels 56 to 59, 57 being the most popular. Mostrepeaters output on these channels, while input from amateur operators is often in another band.[3]
Digital cable-ready orDCR is a label used by manufacturers on newtelevisions which feature built-in technology that allows consumers to receiveSDTV andHDTVdigital cable programs.[4] Usually this is aQAM tuner, since over-the-air broadcasts are eitherCOFDM (DVB-T andISDB-T) or8VSB (ATSC-T). Some cable TV systems in North America use16VSB instead of256QAM, for which there are no cable-ready devices. Only channels that are left unencrypted can be received using this method, however encrypted channels can be viewed without a set-top-box using systems such as aCableCard or using aDownloadable Conditional Access System.
Interactive digital cable ready oriDCR extends DCR. Unlike the DCR standard, iDCR supportsinteractive customer features such aselectronic program guides,pay-per-view andvideo on demand. Consumer devices which support iDCR also support the newOpenCable Application Platform (OCAP) standard developed byCableLabs.
In practice however, the rental ofcable converter boxes (or since the late 2010s, the rent-to-own arrangement ofdigital media players with a provider's app if the customer prefers) has remained a lucrative business line for most cable providers, and they have preferred to phase out support of analog or digital cable-ready televisions which are not CableCard compliant and rent converter boxes out instead, with prevention ofcable theft another reason for the arrangement.