Todd Spangler at Multichannel broke the news this morning. Comcast is buying up to six million digital terminal adapters (DTAs) this year in an effort to migrate to all-digital broadcasts throughout 20% of its footprint in 2008. The DTAs are coming from Motorola (my employer), Pace and Thomson. DTAs work by converting QAM channels broadcast without encryption to analog signals. They don’t include any conditional access technology, a program guide, or support two-way services such as VOD.
[Note from Dave: I received a tip from Glenn (thanks!) last week referring to USA Today coverage of same. Wonder if Comcast may attempt to bypass SDV entirely by freeing up this bandwidth? Hmmm. Perhaps going all QAM will force them to standardize how theyand map these channels (verus the current Comcast clear QAM chaos in my region).]