Your TV vs the Internet

If you watch tv in Canada be prepared to pay for it. the normal paradigm shouldn't really apply anymore.

So much is available through the internet and so called 'grey area' if you don't need to review a preset whatever selection as provided by your provider of Shaw or Telus.

When it comes to digital services always remember that bandwidth is meant to generate income and the provider will find a way to compress more channels in the air of providing you a better experience.

Cable has more bandwidth then the varient of VDSL, but IPTV technically uses more bandwidth for what you are likey watching because it's only showing what needs to be shown.

Cable will continue to compress and make your 1080i  (or usually much less) picture which takes about 29.9 Mbit per second uncompressed likely uses only a small fraction of that in actualy bandwidth.

Clear picture per channel is never guaranteed. If you were a past or current provider of satilite digital you got a good view of what 720p was (dvd) and if you have uncompressed OTA HDTV signals in your area then you can see how good a signal can be.

On the flip side.. If you really don't care how clear things are the net is a relatively good choice. If I like a movie/tv series I get it on DVD or Blu-ray if it's available otherwise it's just more economical to go through another way.

Which brings me to internet..

Shaw really squeezes you here the current plan of 45$ doesn't give you much for that you get 10Mbit down and .512Mbit up with a cap of 125Gb.. recently shaw has upgraded the upload side to 3Mbit but you'll need to change out your modem. So if it works well we are at par with Telus.

Telus (non optik) is roughly 39$/month for 6Gbit it gets more expensive to 25Mbit for about 54$ (I'm a little unclear which is optik but I believe the 15 or 25Mbit plans are optik TV only. Optik TVas far as I can tell is required if you want the higher speed so your cost jumps to 75$ a month.

Telus has more of an edge when tocomes to upload speed, Shaw has much better download speeds as you can get up to 250Mbit if you are willing to shell out 140$ a month for it.. about 30 less if you can live within the cap of 1TB which you can technically download in roughly 42 hours.. With all the Torrents etc that one could have and if you were  properly prepared you could download a lot in that time.. but will have huge issues with mananging TB's of data (assuming you like digital libraries etc)

If at all possible do a combination of internet and OTA Signals. If you need to be served all the channels you will simply have to pay a lot for it.