Select Individual Channel on Four TVs with Comcast?

Question

Have had Dish for ten years driving four TV's with one box in parallel. All TV's on the same Dish Channel. Control is not a problem because of UHF remote. Local channels are received over the air (OTA). and can be individually selected by the individual TV's tuner. OTA digital channels are fracturing and dropping signal. If I continue with Dish, I will lose the flexibility of OTA selection because there will be no analog signal, and poor digital reception. Realigning antenna is not an option.

Considering Comcast, because as I understand it you can make individual channel selections with one box on a parallel hookup by using the TV's individual tuner. Similar to the way my Dish is setup now. (Except all signals would be Comcast)In other words one TV would be controlled through the Comcast box and the others through the individual TV tuners.

If this assumption is not correct, and I feeling it is not, how can individual control be gained without resorting to four boxes?

Answer 1

I'm not sure what that was about.....

It does sound as if you can continue to operate the same way with Comcast.  

And, you could continue with the OTA antenna if you run them through the soon to be required digital boxes for your analog sets.

Now, do you mean you get break-up on the digital stations or the HD stations?  This is a sign of reception problems with HD channels, so you may not want to deal with this.  I do this since not all my local HD channels are carried by Charter.

Answer 2

Individual tuning on TVs is possible on cable only where there is no cable box on the connection to that TV.  Exception:  Cable box is connected via splitter and feeds video input only so that the cable direct connection is to the antenna/cable input of the TV.  Otherwise you need four cable boxes.  

Most cable systems have up to 98 channels which are analog (usuallly less now with digital cable on most systems).  All the analog channels are tunable with a cable ready TV set based on 1980s cable ready tuning technology.  Some HDTV sets with ATSC and QAM tuners (in the US) can tune some unscrambled channels (depends on your cable system) without a box.  But scrambled channels require either a box or a cable card for a HDTV that has a cable card slot.

As more cable channels go to digital to provide clearer pictures and HDTV pictures less analog channels appear on a given cable system.  Why?  Because they can pass only so many channels through their cable (more than we can do free over the air but still a limited number).  Going digital on cable allows them to squeeze in more programs in the same space as one analog channel (up to 64 for those Music Choice channels).  But the trade off is that now you have to have a box or cable card which you have to rent from them to see those additional channels.

Check with your cable company to see what you can really see on the other TV sets not connected to the box.  And do what I did, install a switch so you can feed the box to more than one location (more than one TV) but switch it back for individual control at the TV.  Or use the audio video inputs and an audio video distribution amplifier to send the cable box output to your TV sets that way you have both inputs (direct from cable into the antenna/cable input and from the cable box into an AV input that you can select if your TVs have AV inputs).

Answer 3

If I were you I would just skip Comcast... I have it and I am very unhappy. They lie on all of their comercials. But do whatever you want!