Wait, it sounds like the cable companies will still be able to screw you....

There are a lot of positive articles floating right now about the new FCC rules on the whole digital vs analog cable ruling.

However, if you read the fine print... this ruling looks like it only applies to those 13 or so channels that make up the core "very basic, so basic it sucks, here have some infomercials with that" lineup. (see Broadcast Basic).

When we were in Texas, we had Comcast for a while.. before we switched to a dish. Anyway, Comcast was changing our lineup all the time. The normal result? Analog cable users - here's another local access real estate channel. Oh wait, to give you that, let us take away 2 branded channels... those are for the very special people who pay for digital cable only.

My beef isn't even actually with digital cable. It's that the cable companies have grabbed onto digital cable as a way to squeeze more money out of subscribers. If I want to add a room to my analog cable, I can just plug the TV into a line.. which I could run myself. If I want to add a room to digital cable? No, sorry, pay a deposit on a set-top box, pay rent for that box, and ohhh, you can only have so many rooms of cable. ($4.50 a month per tv, plus $6.99 a month per jack, for example) (So, for our current cable use, an total increase of about $35/month and unknown tivo compatibility.)

So, yeah, I, the customer am not really happy with TimeWarner using this to jack my rates up for technology that I am about 99.9% sure isn't actually needed (on the cable end).