The typical solution, to the best of my knowledge (Score 1)

Hi all (first post, long time lurker), I am IT for a PEG (Public, Educational, and Govermental) station that provides 3 SD channels to the regional Comcast Headend which then provides it to all residents of the local municipality. I know a fair bit about this subject and while not an expert, I have seen a fair number of deployments similar to the one you are describing and I am aware of a commmon and time-tested solution. The situation the OP is describing is going to be one encountered by an increasing number of folks as it makes a ton of sense now for cable providers to move to digital only. The cable provider at my location (Comcast) is doing the exact same thing and has just finished moving all non-basic channels to the digital tier. There are countless reasons for the transition to digital delivery including more bandwidth for IP applications as well as an increasing number of HD channels being delivered. My very first inclination would be to demand digital converter boxes from your cable provider. If you have a pre-existing franchise agreement under which you are entitled to delivery of the expanded basic channels then the cable company is clearly obligated to honor this agreement regardless of the channel delivery. My hope would be that you fight for digital converter boxes for each one of your televisions. These are small, mass produced units that the cable companies provide to cable subscribers for free or a low one-time or monthly fee. This is important: DIGITAL CABLE IS ALMOST ALWAYS ENCRYPTED NOW BY THE CABLE COMPANIES. EVEN IF YOU CAN RECIEVE CHANNELS WITH A CLEAR QAM TUNER OR BY PLUGGING DIRECTLY IN TO YOUR TV, THE CABLE COMPANIES WANT YOU TO USE THEIR TUNER AND WILL MOVE IN THIS DIRECTION IF THEY HAVEN'T ALREADY. THIS ALSO PREVENTS YOU FROM RECIVING CHANNELS YOU DONT PAY FOR. THEREFORE SIMPLY PURCHASING QAM TUNERS OR TV'S WITH BUILT IN QAM TUNERS WOULD LIKELY BE A WASTE. I am very surprised that the cable company dosen't already have a mechanism in place for providing free digital boxes to cable-connected municipalities and schools. In my town, all the schools receive free cable and the signal is amplified and split throughout the school. I'm not sure if this is a cable company courtesy or part of legislation. It sounds like all your TV's are traditional standard definition televisions that have built in analog NTSC tuners. You are going to need digital tuner boxes from your cable company no matter what, but you have a choice as to wether or not you have one for each TV or just purchase one for each channel and use a deck of analog modulators to deliver your channels to your televisions. It would work something like this: 1) The cable company connection to the building. This is either via fiber to a small node/DA inside the building, or simply via a coax cable like that delivered to residences. Either way this connection ends in coax. 2) You then take this coax connection and split the coaxial connection to the number of channels you want to deliver to your televisions. 3) For the number of channels you want to deliver, you need to match this number with an equal number of digital cable boxes provided by your cable company. 4) Each one of these digital cable boxes will be tuned to a different channel provided by the cable company. E.G. 1: The Weather Channel, 2: CNN, etc. 5) You also need to purchase the same number of analog cable modulators. These will allow you to assign each cable provided channel an analog channel within your building. 6) After modulating each digital channel to an analog channel, you need to combine these into a single coaxial connection. 7) At this point you will likely want the connection to pass through a distribution amplifier if you don't already have one. This simply amplifies the coaxial connection for delivery throughout the entire building. 8) The connection will then pass through your existing splitter and coaxial wiring connecting all your televisions throughout your building. The problem is that you would have to repeat this for each one of your municipal buildings. I don't think this would be cost effective. Essentially you are creating your own miniature cable "headend" by taking the channels provided to you by your cable company (digital) and distributing these channels to your televisions (analog). The purpose of this would be to convert digital channels to analog channels to support your existing television configuration. Since the OP described less than 50 televisions in total, it may not make sense financially to invest in this setup, although it would be fairly low cost. Also, sooner or later you will want to replacing your aging televisions with HDTV's and suddenly you will find that your fancy analog conversion setup will not support digital HD channels. State laws, franchise agreements, cable company infrastructure, equipment and methods of channel delivery vary greatly throughout the country but hopefully this information will point you in the right direction. I'm positive someone will have an answer for you because there are so many situations where cable companies provide cable to a building with a large number of televisions: Hospitals, Hotels, Airports, Schools, Municipal Buildings, etc. I apologize if any part of my post was overly technical. I tried to describe things as best I could. Feel free to drop me an email if you have any questions: [e-mail] I saw lots of great suggestions here. Maybe there is some simply device that converts all digital channels to analog. I don't know. Slashdot is awesome. Good luck.