TV from another
March 15, 2010 9:50 PM   Subscribe

Can I see into your satellite TV?

I live in Los Angeles.

About a year ago we got rid of our cable box (Time Warner). When they came to take the box away I asked the guy if he had recommendations on a pair of rabbit ears for HD reception, he said, oh, just plug the cable back directly into your TV (Sony Bravia) and you will have all the local cables channels available in HD. And that is what we did. It is the only TV in our house.

Tonight I was scanning channels and came upon "Precious" on channel 89.5 (The channels are all over the place and run from like 1 to 113 and some have two and three decimal places.

I figured it was a preview or a clip and started to watch. About 15 fifteen minutes later and a bunch of words that are not allowed on TV, the picture paused, then it rewound about five minutes worth and then the screen went black. Nothing came back. The rewind looked like a DVR or something, there were no FF or RW functions on screen, but it just looked like a digital scanning. The image quality of the movie was excellent.

What was I watching?

Bonus points: How do I get it back?
posted by silsurf to Media & Arts (5 answers total)
 
It might be an error on the part of a local broadcaster.

But is it possible that you are actually plugged into the cable network? With it plugged directly into the TV, you'd be getting only the unencrypted QAM channels, which cable companies are legally required to provide but they usually don't put any effort into organizing or monitoring. And if your cable guy happened to be lazy that day, he may have "forgotten" to physically disconnect the cable hookup from your house -- it happens all the time. Or, if you're paying for cable Internet, it may not be possible to disconnect your cable TV without killing that too.

On-demand video is often sent as an unencrypted QAM signal on a channel that's not otherwise being used. Maybe you caught a neighbor rewinding?
posted by miyabo at 10:12 PM on March 15, 2010


You were watching on-demand/PPV. When it rewinds/FFs, it's because the actual customer who ordered that on-demand/PPV is doing it.

But yeah, it's pretty cool.
posted by CommonSense at 10:17 PM on March 15, 2010


Your TV has a QAM tuner. Slate article.
posted by Rhomboid at 10:51 PM on March 15, 2010


Response by poster: You were watching on-demand/PPV. When it rewinds/FFs, it's because the actual customer who ordered that on-demand/PPV is doing it."

Why did the screen go black and never reappear? I assume they were done, but it seemed more like they had come back into the room and re-winded in order to pick up viewing?

I will never know of course.
posted by silsurf at 7:52 AM on March 16, 2010


I'm only speculating here, but my guess would be that maybe the channel changes regularly. A subscriber with a cable box doesn't need to know/care about this, because the channel changes are probably negotiated between the cable provider's servers and the cable box, and they use pauses as an opportunity to sync up these channel changes, transparent to the viewer (but frustrating for voyeurs).
posted by CommonSense at 8:55 AM on March 16, 2010


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