Slashdot Mirror
Outside the Cable Box
An anonymous reader writes: "Interesting article from the Philadelphia Inquirer that talks about the Cable industry's goal of creating a tv top device that can work in any franchise. 'Some fear that Comcast will wield inordinate clout in deciding what kind of box customers will be able to buy.' It's only their goal because the government made them.
"... the DCP501 home theater system, a hybrid digital cable box, DVD player and high-end stereo that goes for $900."
I'd be scared to spend that sort of money on any TV tuner because the widespread adoption of HDTV is on the horizon. Undoubtedly the tuners of today will become useless within a few years time with DRM being built into programming and all. I've always seen that as a reason not to buy combo systems; when one of the components becomes obsolete, you have to replace the whole thing.
The future isn't what it used to be.
Any chance for an open source/hardware design to compete (or at least make an entry) in this market segment? It'd be great to have an alternative to the major "powers that be" as far as an source of supply for cable hardware.... I don't want to simply exchange who get's paid for the hardware...
Before we launch into the conspiracy theory (government/cable company control of what you think etc...) I would just like to say that the UK has had this kind of interactive box for a while now... and they work really well. Both cable and satellite users have a digital set top box that not only allows them to watch TV but also interact with the programming. It lets them view different camera feeds, participate in polls and quizzes, interactive TV schedules that can be linked to hard disk recording, not to mention the ease of buying stuff with those home shopping channels. Just pressing the red button the remote control when watching a news program brings up a wealth of background information.
Granted the boxes are provided by the cable or satellite company, and yes they do decide what you get to view... but hasn't this always been the way with television?
--dan
A universal set-top box would be very convenient - it brings together a wide, demanding audience from various cable companies, and as a result, may provide a better "viewing experience".
However, could this be another ploy by the industries to round the entire consumer base up in order to easily dish out digital rights management technology?
Then again, it's just a black box...
Surely the future of TV decoding is in Software, not hardware.
Even my laptop is quite up to the job of decoding a DVD glitch free without a funky card on board.
Sell me a licence to a bit of software that I can install on any hardware, that will allow me to watch certain channels. When I want to upgrade just send me a patch, so I can watch more football.
Soon it will be cheaper to bundle the hardware with a DVD player, or CD plater, or the TV, or you kettle - so why persist in trying to get people to buy boxes. People are scared of wasting money on black boxes.
Sell them a bit of software on the otherhand - and give them a free box with it - and away you go. They then know that when the software or the hardware start to limit their fun they can upgrade without having to throw the lot away.
The IEEE had an article on it here in July. It's got some of the specs they're aiming for, as well as a few of the other big players. M$ is in there of course. The last paragraph is also a nice reality check.
Comcast is wielding monoplistic powers(yeah its not spelled right). I recently turned off my cable TV service in favor of DirecTV. However I kept my Cable Modem service as its the only high-speed internet service availble to me(no dsl yet). Comcast tells me they are very sorry i'm changing at that my bill will be $5 more a month now that i don't have cable TV.. fine no problem i say..
So now 3 months later i get a letter in the mail informing me that the because that they have a great new pricing scheme for Cable Internet. In fact the price stays the SAME at $42 of your a comcast subscriber.
But if yer not a comcast subscriber its now $60!! ok people thats insane!
but wait! comcast will offer me(in same letter) truly basic cable tv of 30 channels(remember when that was a lot?) for 12 dollars a month more.. and of course since i would get cable from them the internet would go back down to $42.. and i would SAVE 17 dollars according to them.. Yet either way i still pay at least 15-17 more dollars.. and i don't even want their stinking Cable. Oh and i have 1 week to decide by next billing cycle the letter states..
No not a abusive monopoly at all.. Now I'm just waiting for DSL to become available in my area and I'll switch first chance i can & Then i'll never have to give money to comcast again. They lost a customer with that horrible "new" policy of thiers.
I would like to see these groups actually solicit input from and listen to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Instead of letting big business install DRM copy-rape software at our expense, fair protections should be built into these boxes to allow us to timeshift, possibly skip commercials, and even to share broadcasts. I don't mind if a "pay per view" show can't be shared, or even if it has limited views after recording, but I want the ability to watch what I want when I want and how I desire. If the potential customers had some say in how these boxes are designed, we might be much more likely to buy the things. Ease the fears of your typical /. reader, and the companies will find lots of technology acolytes to preach the wonders to the masses. Make us happy, and we will recommend the boxes to our family and friends. Ignore us, and may these boxes go the way of the Divx boxes that Circuit City lost so much money on. Media companies, throw us a bone and gain valuable allies. Screw us over and we will hack our ways to freedom.
To those who claim we have no fair use rights, I buy items to own. I expect the freedom to use my possessions as I see fit. Any restrictions on that perceived right of mine will be resisted by all means possible. Do not forget the power of the customer, we are always right.
Note, I am not a consumer. I will not be spoonfed whatever the media companies decide. I am a customer and I exercise the right to withhold my money if mistreated.
This is one of the big reasons I canceled cable and continue to refuse to get a satellite system--I don't want a box, with another remote (that would make 5 total) and a barrier to recording one program while I watch another. We know why cable providers love these stupid boxes (they can send more vacuous, overly-compressed channels, and don't like time-shifting anyway) but unless they can come up with a convincing reason I should pay for inferior service, I'll continue to just say no.
It seems like the cable industry has a great incentive to commonize the set-top cable box. With equipment manufacturers coming and going over the years, with diverging equipment standards, why didn't the cable industry collective deliver a conclusion a decade ago?
Clearly they were able to do so with cable modems (DOCSIS). I know the whole cable modem buiness was on 3 or 5 years old, so maybe that was the difference.
I think a study of their failure to get their act together would help other industries (like the wireless telephone industry) figure out what the heck they're doing wrong. Clearly, commonality of standards greatly lowers infrastructure costs. And CATV and Wireless Telco wants to minimize device cost, 'cause they sell service.
Does some business school have a (good) case study that discusses this issue? If these business schools are worth beans, someone has studied this before and published it in a journal. Someone post a URL!
Well, for one thing "they" are going to have to decide on a conditional access system (the part the encrypts/decrypts the premium content). The two big players, Motorola and Scientific Atlanta, both currently use their own proprietary schemes, and wield a lot of power on their own (after you spend several *illion dollars to setup a Moto system, switching to SA ain't cheap or easy).
This whole thing sounds like it's going to go the route of HDTV in the US: it's going to keep getting pushed out further and further while Hollyweird and the current monoplies sort out how much they can gouge us, and how much they can minimize our use of the content.
In the end, we all lose.
I think I'm going to put my rabbit ears back on my tube, and tell 'em all to K.M.A
-This sig intentionally left blank
Microsoft FP XP.net
Does that make me a bad person?
One box, one cable company, one tv channel, one show.
I quess Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft and other game console manufacturers are already planning when to start production of devices which combine them all, and also develop remote applications (like office tools). Is this Microsoft's worst nightmare actually? Switching to another office suite, for example, is much more simpler if it does not require any installation but is done over network instead. Maybe this was another reason why they jumped into game console business.
That was when it was just the engineers. Then the lawyers got involved. Oh yes. The lovely EU Competition Commision discovered this bunch of engineers from all the major players working together and decided that wouldn't do, and split them up. They forced ITV and the cable companies to eject Sky, and pay Murdoch a few hundred million pounds in compensation. From that point on things just went downhill. The idea of the universal box was killed the moment the managers, lawyers and marketroids got hold of it.
The humble cable box, for years a mere channel-flipper, is in for a multimedia makeover: Beefed-up boxes of the future could let you play video games online, share digital photos with friends, and maybe do other things people in the business haven't even imagined yet.
They need to come over to my house and play with Sky Digital if this is what they think. Playing games on your TV? Been there, done that, it doesn't work needless to say. For one, the games take forever to load - even with the gigabits of bandwidth they have coming off of Astra it can take several minutes to load games - it's like being back with a Commodore 64. Then, when the games do load, they are extremely primitive and loaded with advertising. Realtime games are out as the latency involved from the handset is huge - I tried a simple top down racing game one time, it was almost unplayable as the car responded almost a second after I hit the button. Finally, there aren't many of them, as interactive TV applications are far more expensive to produce than computer apps. Interactive TV is basically dead as a from of entertainment. Where it does shine is in getting information - BBC News Interactive and Sky News Active are great. It also does simple interactive additions to programs quite well. The multiple football camera angles are rare however due to the large amount of bandwidth required.
Believe me, interactive TV on a universal cable box? It's a TV engineers dream but in the real world, we've done it, and the PC kicks its ass in almost every respect. It's a big (expensive) white elephant.
There is already an open standard called DVB MHP (see www.mhp.org) for interactive television boxes. MHP stands for Multimedia Home Platform. MHP conformant products have already been launched in Finland and Germany and other european countries will follow over the next coming years.
MHP is gradually being adopted by other continents apart from europe (australia for instance) and in the US, CableLabs has announced that they will be using MHP in their OpenCable specification (see this press release)
This will also help push out those interactive features so many people want. Well, someone wants.
"Nearly 500 government and private-sector groups have toiled on the project since its 1997 inception."
Obviously the DRM issue has yet to be settled as well.
...TV-cum-Internet.
Come again?
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
I know you have to be different by the European standard body for this stuff has a standard called MHP Have a look which already does all of this stuff. The organisation is called DVB that produces this, most of the rest of the planet has gone with the DVB specs and MHP as a future technology direction.
If you want everything to be different the go ahead, but wouldn't it be better all round if the box manufacturers could get cost multiples based on a world market rather than just the US, that way the price of the box could be driven even further down. And with an end game of PS3s being set-up as MHP boxes so you buy that and you've got the box.
OpenCable have taken much of the DVB work and "tweaked" it enough to make it non-standard with DVB because of "differences" in the US market. The reality is that they've done this to keep a closed market rather than face the fact that TV is TV and iTV is just iTV the place where its broadcast is completely immaterial.
Now if you could just use PAL as well we'd just have the French to convert
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
With free-as-in-speech, not RA(N)D, licensing. Because I want to be able to build my own box that doesn't send all my viewership data back to the Man.
According to my e-mail inbox, I can get all the descramblers I want for any cable system for only $50, anyways!
And we all know that if an offer comes via e-mail, it must be legit...
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
The CEA (Consumer Electronics Association), the trade group for the companies that would build and sell a retail cable STB (set-top box), has repeatedly said that the secret contract terms offered by CableLabs, known as the PHILA (POD-Host Interface License Agreement) are unacceptable. This has stalled the process of making STBs available as a retail product for several years. See the CEA press release. The HRRC (Home Recording Rights Coalition) is also opposed to the PHILA.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
In fact, DOCSIS 2 is largely based on MHP.
Here
C'mon guys, let's screw 'em like they've screwed us. Any help is appreciated, and I'm equally interested in Scientific Atlanta or Motorola/GI digital cableboxes.
It works this way across the industry. Charter offers three levels of internet service (they call them bronse, silver and gold). I bought their cheapest service for a reasonable price. A couple months later, I got a letter in the mail. The price of my service was going to rise $10 to just under the price of the next level. THAT VERY DAY, I get a phone call from charter - After the changes to the price structure, I can upgrade to the next level for only $5!
Of course, if I wanted to upgrade, I could have at any time - for the same $15.
I used to live in a market where our only choice for cable was Comcast. Year to year, little by little, they kept increasing the cost of basic service. When I moved to a larger city I had a choice between Comcast and two other companies. Needless to say, I didn't go with Comcast. My cable is now cheaper and I get more channels. My service has cable, telephone, and broadband internet all in one package for about $90/month. Before, I was paying almost $40 for basic cable. What a rip off.
-- Probability does not dismiss possibility --
No because advertisers will realize that Slashdot != Sales!
Eventually they will stop advertising and this shithole will go down for good.
(How could they expect to make any money off of people who claim to be using "open source" software, but are really just pirating Windows?)
... which counts for shit now, with son-of-a-general Powell in charge of FCC. Hold in there, maybe in a decade that area of consumers' right will be as advanced as it is in Spain today, where *all* cable and PPV and satellite boxes are interchangeable.
It's now 2002. Most of us don't tune with the TV anymore. Many of us have VCRs or some other tuner in between. Most of us are really tired of figuring out that the VCR (or PVR) must be 'listening' to the cable box to record the premium channels while the TV is watching something else. It's a big PITA. I spend too much time walking mom and her friends through how to set it up because of this stupid box.
Most of us have laptops or are familiar in some way with PCCards.
What if EVERY TV tuner had a PCCard (aka PCMCIA) like slot in it? What if there were no cable box? Let the card handle the decoding and all the roles of the big hot cable box. Let me slide the card into my VCR that is really the tuner, let me carry it into that spare TV I keep in the garage when I'm working there - it's not worth a box, but I've moved the box into there.
Most televisions with tuners (non-"monitors") are capable of tuning in 200+ channels. Yet they are usually locked onto channel 3. The box demodulates the signal then remodulates it - usually with poor quality - to pass it to the TV. The Audio-Out of those boxes generally is limited to a 30dB range - too poor to run into the home ent. system, so I run it out of the demodulator (my VCR).
Results of a no-box system?
- Lower costs for cable weasels
- Better quality for end users
- Slight increase in costs for various tuners to support (run signal to card and take it back) (start now and it will be commoditized and can be advertised as an advantage)
- Flexibility for the customer
- Portability for the customer
- Easier to program/upgrade for cable provider (need digital, fine - re-flash them or swap them out and do it remotely)
Make it a standard and it will be cheap and work for your cable, or satellite, etc. No sony-only or comcast-only system. Pins 2&4 take balanced digital in, pins 8 & 12 put it out. A DSP and flash are "magic goes here", and you're done.TV industry, are you listening?
No. Thanks for asking though.
-- TV industry
Well, for one thing "they" are going to have to decide on a conditional access system (the part the encrypts/decrypts the premium content).
The last time I checked, OpenCable moves the conditional access out of the cable box and into a module called a POD. So if your cable company uses Moto CA they'll give you a Moto POD and if they use SA CA they'll give you that POD.
Gee, it's only what Sony and MS have been attempting to do in earnest lately. Remember? Control of your living room? The all in one box? News? We don't need no stinkin' news!
You need a FREE iPod Nano
im sorry ppl, i work as a hardware engineer and any signal that you can get can be recorded, or shared. doesnt matter wut. its all in the specs of each hardware/software device. these last steps are a war cry plea for the media industries to try and save there selfs and wut market they have left. in bout 10 years, ull see wut i mean.