I've been having sporadic problems with my TV/cable box for some time. A fairly new TV (<1 year old) was showing strange error messages regarding the cable box. I've gone through several cable boxes over the years as they tend to die in 2-4 years. While trying to fix the problem, I touched an HDMI cable (supplied by the cable company) and got an error message on the TV. I bought this quality replacement cable and the error messages are gone and the picture is better than I've ever seen. Little did I know that cables can degrade over time.