If you're confused about whether to subscribe to a cable TV service or a satellite TV service, then you're certainly not alone. These two industries are obviously in direct competition with each other and have been fighting a propaganda war for years, while struggling to develop technology in order to pull ahead of each other's ability to offer real value to subscribers. All of this makes it understandable to be confused about which of these two types of services truly offers superior service.



Fortunately the cable TV industry has developed some new technology that clearly makes it superior to the satellite TV industry in a number of different ways. This technology is called switched digital video (sometimes referred to as SDV) and it's based on the fact that the cables used by cable TV companies can transmit information in two directions instead of just one. This allows cable TV companies to offer a virtually unlimited number of channels to their subscribers.

In order to understand how switched digital video can do this, you need to understand how cable TV (and TV in general) works without the use of this technology. Without switched digital video technology any kind of TV transmission technology must rely on the capability of transmitting all of the channels it offers to all subscribers all at once, and then letting a TV tuner literally tune out all of the channels that the viewer doesn't want to watch at any given time. This is extremely inefficient from the standpoint of bandwidth use because all of the unwatched channels are still being transmitted even though the viewer isn't watching them. Switched digital video is a protocol that eliminates this inefficiency by allowing viewers to request a specific channel and allowing the transmitter to send that specific channel to the viewer. Since only one channel (or two in the case of picture in picture) is being transmitted at any given time, bandwidth no longer limits the number of channels that are available to watch!

Of course, all of this might prompt you to ask why this makes cable TV superior to satellite TV. After all, satellite TV and cable TV share many of the same kinds of technology. Both use digital signals, both use video compression to transmit more channels over the same bandwidth, and both even provide video on demand option. Despite the similarities between the two, there is one very big difference: cables can transmit signals in both directions while the satellite technology used by satellite TV companies only transmits signals in one direction. In other words, there's no way for the satellite TV viewer to request a specific channel, while the cable TV viewer can.

One side benefit of switched digital video technology is that it makes video on demand options much easier to offer as well. While satellite TV companies are limited by the size of DVR hard drives in the number of video on demand options they can offer, satellite TV companies will be able to use switched digital video technology to provide a much larger amount of video on demand programming.

These technological benefits make cable TV the better choice for meeting home TV needs.