More About Post-Transition Analog Cable (Among Other Things)

I've posted before (here and here) about the problems cablecos might have providing a viable analog cable package after 2/17/09, due to current regulations forbidding them from downconverting digital broadcast signals to analog.

But things are looking up on that score. Those regulations were a response to objections from broadcasters, who seem to rethinking said objections, according to this Broadcasting & Cable article.

But just because broadcasters are now OK with conversion with analog, that doesn't mean that they don't have serious issues with cable (as the article title points out). It's just that now they don't want cable to downconvert HD signals to ordinary SD digital cable. It seems they're afraid that they will use those signals instead of the full-strength HD signals. Myself, I can't imagine any cable system being dumb enough to do something so likely to terminally piss off a growing, demographically desirable audience. More likely (just guessing here) they want to give their non-HD "digital cable" audience an SD taste of the HD channels they're missing.

More info on this can be obtained from this HD Beat post (where I found out about it in the first place) and this AVS thread.