Lower-priced cable TV alternative unveiled
A Utah company launched what it called a digital cable-style subscription television service "for the rest of us" on Tuesday, an alternative that eliminates the coaxial cable and strips basic service to a few essential networks with a price to match.
For $19.95, USDTV gives subscribers in Salt Lake City 32 channels, including local broadcast outlets. ESPN, ESPN2, Disney and Discovery Channel are five of the 10 cable networks currently included in the package, but more may be added.
The service is also available in Albuquerque and is expected to launch in Las Vegas in the next month, and the company hopes to offer service to 30 markets by year's end. About 1,000 customers have signed up in Salt Lake.
USDTV works by collecting feeds from the broadcast stations and cable networks at a single digital transmission tower, which then uses once-idle bandwidth -- bought from the stations -- to spray the signals to standard UHF/VHF antennas.
Customers must buy a $99.95 set-top device to decode the channels. USDTV says a strength of its system is its support for high-definition programming. In the Salt Lake market, six of the local stations broadcast high-definition signals.
