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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.
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
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.
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)
RoadRunner used to do this too, but one of the techs told me they got in trouble for the practice and had to stop. So now you can get RoadRunner cable service for the exact same price as if you had cable with them. You may want to check around and see if you can find anything...
I'm utterly fed up with Comcast, and would dearly love to switch but have no options in my area. No DSL, and no other cable provider, unfortunately. Their crimes are many and grievous:
* The initial kit they sent me contained a dead NIC. That didn't matter too much, seeing as how they didn't supply drivers. That was back in, oh, April, I think. I still don't have a replacement NIC. By the way, Comcast, it's unacceptable to tell me that I can always go and buy my own NIC. I shouldn't have to pay extra to fix a problem in which the fault is entirely yours!
* Despite their advertising claims of "no disconnections" (a touted benefit over dial-up), I keep getting disconnected. I'll be surfing and emailing, then...nothing. Usually this results in me having to phone them and tell them they've got a problem (it's most frequently a server down). And, mate, do I love being told by them they don't have a problem and it must be on my end, until after five or ten minutes of arguing they finally say, "oh, wait, you're right, we DO have a problem in your area". No kidding.
* I'll frequently start up my computer and check my e-mail only to discover my authentication isn't accepted. I can wait and hope, or log on and reset my passwords and watch it spring back into life. Account maintenance? What account maintenance? Strange, by the way, the only accounts which ever have this problem are the three (out of six) from which I've sent email complaints.
* Their technical support staff have no idea what they can or can't do. I've phoned and been promised a specific resolution, then three days later phoned to find out the status only to be told "Comcast doesn't do that". When I've pointed out that I was point-blank promised they did do that only three days ago, I usually get some lame excuse of "well, we changed our policy last week".
I've asked them to explain the advertising claims of "no disconnections" which are demonstrably false. Big surprise -- they're conveniently ignoring that little issue. I've also asked them to explain why I often have to reset my account passwords. (Most recently -- this morning, three of my accounts wouldn't authenticate until I'd reset the passwords.)
Usually I get a reply asking me to call technical support. Why should I? The problem and resolution are clearly established, and calling technical support means I have to hang on the phone (wasting my time which I could be charging out at $250 an hour, thus resulting in lost revenue of $41.67 every ten minutes, which I'm sure they're not going to reimburse), only to get a reply which I can't be sure is going to be valid tomorrow.
I've never been this angry at a company, and would almost consider it worthwhile to go back to dial-up simply to be freed from the appalling company that is Comcast. And therein lies the rub; it's just too convenient, and I don't have a high-speed option. But here is the most telling feature of a monopoly; whenever I've complained to Comcast about their service problems, their reply has been two-fold:
(i) get a T1 line for my home to get more reliable connectivity (I kid you not, this was their recommendation);
(ii) Comcast doesn't have any service level agreements. Out for more than 24 hours? Well, then we can credit your account out of the graciousness of our hearts. But we don't have to do anything, we don't have to provide any minimum level of service, and you can't do anything about it.
So who do I complain to? I'm a permanent resident, but not a citizen (I've not lived here long enough to apply for citizenship yet), so can I complain to a politician given I can't vote for them? Will the Better Business Bureau do anything? Or is there something like a chamber of commerce at a local level to whom it would be appropriate to direct complaints? Because, frankly, I've had a gutsful of Comcast and I'm angry enough that I want to do something to make them take notice, but I haven't yet heard of a class-action suit against them. Is there anything I can do in Montgomery County, PA?