That is unless they choose to pay.

"It costs just one dollar more a month to have a digital converter placed on your television," Theressa Davis, a spokesperson for Comcast said.

"However that is only for the first TV. If you want to add a second TV it's $6.99 more a month for a total of two boxes and $9.99 more a month for three boxes."

Davis said MSNBC's move up the digital dial is just the first of what will eventually be a total conversion over to digital feed.

Some critics have raised the question of politics. Peter Ames Carlin, a columnist for the Oregonian argued that the move may be a way to quiet Keith Olbermann's liberal news-talk program.
But according to the Pew Research Center MSNBC is consistently the lowest ranked cable news channel. It falls well behind FOX and CNN.

Researchers at Pew and Journalism.org (an independent media analysis group) have demonstrated that, even combined, the three big cable news channels don't come close to the viewer-ship of traditional stations such as ABC, NBC, and CBS.

Davis said that MSNBC's move was just the first step and other cable news stations will soon follow it up the dial and onto digital bandwidth.
"We want to eventually have all like programming grouped together, so all of our news channels together, all of our sports channels together all of our shopping channels ... that sort of thing," Davis said.

The Portland City Commissioner Dan Saltzman wrote a public letter to Comcast accusing the cable provider of perpetrating a backdoor rate increase.
Davis failed to comment before deadline as to why the rate increase was necessary and why there was such a rate difference as consumers added additional boxes.

Saltzman may be right, but the Federal Government has mandated that television and radio providers transition their programming to the digital feed by February 17, 2009.

Because digital feed takes up less space in the cable systems, providers can cram more programming into a smaller space and free up the lower-end analogue feed for other uses.

In the next two years rabbit ears will be extinct and more and more people will choose between cable and satellite.

"The bottom line here is there is no regulation for this utility and the consumer's only choice is to dump cable and get satellite, but the two are not interchangeable and it really puts the consumer at a disadvantage," Jeff Bissonnette, organizing director of the Citizen Utility Board of Oregon, said. CUB is a nonprofit consumer advocacy group based in Portland.