Cable-ready is a designation which indicates that a
TV set or other
television-receiving device (such as a
VCR or
DVR) is capable of receiving
cable TV
Cable television is a system of delivering television programming to consumers via radio frequency (RF) signals transmitted through coaxial cables, or in more recent systems, light pulses through fibre-optic cables. This contrasts with broadc ...
without a
set-top box.
The term originated with
analog TV, which uses different frequencies for cable versus
over-the-air. This gives more channels, and at lower
frequencies
Frequency is the number of occurrences of a repeating event per unit of time. It is also occasionally referred to as ''temporal frequency'' for clarity, and is distinct from ''angular frequency''. Frequency is measured in hertz (Hz) which is eq ...
, so that early systems did not have to be so
broadband and were therefore less expensive to build.
For
North American cable television frequencies, the
VHF
Very high frequency (VHF) is the ITU designation for the range of radio frequency electromagnetic waves (radio waves) from 30 to 300 megahertz (MHz), with corresponding wavelengths of ten meters to one meter.
Frequencies immediately below VHF ...
channels 2 to 13 are the same, while an extra 51 cable channels exist between there and over-the-air
UHF
Ultra high frequency (UHF) is the ITU designation for radio frequencies in the range between 300 megahertz (MHz) and 3 gigahertz (GHz), also known as the decimetre band as the wavelengths range from one meter to one tenth of a meter (on ...
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 is ''not'' 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-ready
tuner is for receiving
amateur television (ATV) in North America, where the main ATV
band appears on cable channels 56 to 59, 57 being the most popular. Most
repeaters output on these channels, while input from amateur operators is often in another band.
Digital cable
Digital cable-ready or DCR is a label used by manufacturers on new
televisions which feature built-in technology that allows consumers to receive
SDTV and
HDTV digital cable
Digital cable is the distribution of cable television using digital data and video compression. The technology was first developed by General Instrument. By 2000, most cable companies offered digital features, eventually replacing their previou ...
programs.
Usually this is a
QAM tuner, since over-the-air broadcasts are either
COFDM (
DVB-T
DVB-T, short for Digital Video Broadcasting – Terrestrial, is the DVB European-based consortium standard for the broadcast transmission of digital terrestrial television that was first published in 1997 and first broadcast in Singapore in Febr ...
and
ISDB-T
Integrated Services Digital Broadcasting (ISDB; Japanese: , ''Tōgō dejitaru hōsō sābisu'') is a Japanese broadcasting standard for digital television (DTV) and digital radio.
ISDB supersedes both the NTSC-J analog television system and th ...
) or
8VSB (
ATSC
Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) standards are an American set of standards for digital television transmission over terrestrial, cable and satellite networks. It is largely a replacement for the analog NTSC standard and, like that ...
-T). Some cable TV systems in North America use
16VSB instead of
256QAM
Quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) is the name of a family of digital modulation methods and a related family of analog modulation methods widely used in modern telecommunications to transmit information. It conveys two analog message signal ...
, 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 a
CableCard or using a
Downloadable Conditional Access System.
Interactive digital cable ready or iDCR extends DCR. Unlike the DCR standard, iDCR supports
interactive
Across the many fields concerned with interactivity, including information science, computer science, human-computer interaction, communication, and industrial design, there is little agreement over the meaning of the term "interactivity", but mo ...
customer features such as
electronic program guides,
pay-per-view
Pay-per-view (PPV) is a type of pay television or webcast service that enables a viewer to pay to watch individual events via private telecast.
Events can be purchased through a multichannel television platform using their electronic program guid ...
and
video on demand. Consumer devices which support iDCR also support the new
OpenCable Application Platform (OCAP) standard developed by
CableLabs.
In practice however, the rental of
cable converter boxes (or since the late 2010s, the rent-to-own arrangement of
digital 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 of
cable theft another reason for the arrangement.
References
External links
Tru2way PrimerCableCARD for Digital Cable TV
{{North American DTV
Cable television technology
Digital cable