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FCC Opens Market for Cable Boxes
fistfullast33l writes "The FCC rendered a decision today against a Comcast appeal that centers on integrated security features in set-top cable boxes. The decision comes at the end of a long standing feud between the FCC and cable companies over the matter. The result is that starting July 1st, cable boxes distributed by cable companies must not be tied directly to a cable provider via internal security features. This rule is viewed as the first step in creating a market for set-top cable boxes. Comcast does have the right to appeal and has said they will do so. From the article: 'Several major consumer electronics manufacturers have argued that if set-top boxes weren't directly linked to the provision of cable service, they could enter the set-top market. Consumers could get a cable card from their service provider that they could insert into a set-top box purchased at a consumer electronics store. The cards would ensure that consumers could only access channels that they paid for.'"
The result is that starting July 1st, cable boxes distributed by cable companies must not be tied directly to a cable provider via internal security features.
Now if only they could accomplish this same feat for mobile phones.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Good for Tivo. Bad for Comast.
Don't higher end TVs have "integrated digital cable tuners" where you put a card in and be able to receive the digital channels? From my understanding, the only thing you'd be missing is the "special" services from your cable provider, mainly guide information.
i on-Television/dp/B000A2K3XW
Like this tv:
http://www.amazon.com/Sony-KDFE42A10-Rear-Project
Grump.
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
Could someone with a bit of knowledge on this please enlighten me as to approximately what the percent chance Comcasts appeal will work? Is this guarenteed to happen or could the appeal actually work?
LINUX ONLINE POKER: Linux Poker
Cable companies are right now huge monstrosities, leaving no space for creativity because of their market shares. If other companies could produce boxes that could have new features, like maybe a TiVo in the box, consumers would have better options. And, with every company advertising the pluses to their services, you could have a firmer grip on deciding what to chose, and they could have fairer competition from external companies. I hate monopolies.
So, I can use the same cable box with a built-in DVR that I have now, or I can go out, spend a couple hundred for one (or for a TiVO), and plug in a cablecard for which I will probably pay the same monthly rate I am paying for the existing setup. Net result: I'm out of pocket the cost of a box which does the same thing the one I already have does. So long as the cable company doesn't decide to stop providing the existing boxes, I can ignore this whole thing.
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
Is this a double standard or what? Both DirecTV and Dish Network use locked in boxes..... Will they be required to allow the use of SAT cards any time soon, if ever?
They don't provide two-way communication. This is VERY IMPORTANT as two-way communication is REQUIRED for cable networks that use switched video broadcasting technology. Time Warner in Austin, TX is one such network. I would expect most of not all the digital channels will move to swiched video by the end of 2007. This isn't a problem as a digital box already is required for the digital feed.
Second problem. You won't be able to order PPV or view any on-demand content with cable cards.
Until Cable Cards move to a new spec that support two-way, they're rather worthless these days...and a total scam by themselves anyway.
Life is not for the lazy.
step 1) Cut a hole in a box
step 2) Put your junk in that box
Does this mean we'll have a choice of boxes with better UIs? I hate having to go through several button presses in the menu to access the one and only feature I ever use (listings, sometimes filtering movies only). Worse, the remote has a rather slow repeat rate and a very cheap feel to the button presses. That alone makes me feel like I have to fight the box to watch TV.
Evidently, the key to understanding recursion is to begin by understanding recursion. The rest is easy.
This could be great because you have a competitive market where companies will try and add space and features, but...
First of all, couldn't this render a company's DVR useless? I mean the DVR could be completely controlled by the cable box at that point, so... the service would be obsolete. Second, does this mean that on July 1st, a Comcast guy is going to come to my house, take back his cable box, and hand me a card, expecting me to go out and buy one? I seriously hope the company still intends to supply me with a cable box.
I don't like where this is going.
now, if only we could get a MythTV (i.e. abiltiy to create a Free DVR) clause in there, we'd be golden....
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
... many years ago, it was illegal per AT&T to attach anything but AT&T-approved equipment at home or in a business alike to their network. Eventually, the anti-trust folk, PBX equipment vendors, etc. broke up that racket, IIRC. At the time, AT&T made dire predictions about network reliability, etc. if "non-approved" devices were attached to it. In the end, it was clearly a rear-guard action designed to maximize the lease-money that AT&T was deriving from equipment rentals. This Comcast rethoric is no different, they want to lease a $30 cable box for $4 month ad infinitum.
So, I would very much welcome a requirement to open up the the consumer choices with regard to cable boxes. Ideally, someone at the FCC will have the foresight to look to the EU or other places that have already gone through the trouble of designing a secure option and require an "open" standard instead of allowing content providers to reinvent the wheel yet again to create a NA-only product. While cable-boxes are definitely not as portable as let's say cell-phones (and hence will not derive as much value from being interoperable), economies of scale definitely apply in this business and the more competition, the better for the consumer.
Plus, interoperable product ensures that if cable content providers ever get competition, that cable boxes don't get discarded simply because provider X has a different encryption scheme than vendor Y. Besides the unnecessary lock-in at the set-box level, I would also like to see a requirement by the Feds to allow consumers and content providers to chose their packages à la carte (i.e. disallow bundling requirements). This is the only means of breaking the oligopoly of the content providers and to restore some semblance of consumer choice to the market.
This week the hard disk died in my cable company supplied DVR for the third time. The last failure was less than a year ago. It's only because the Scientific Atlanta boxes that Time Warner was renting me had the crappiest Maxtor drives in them that were probably the cheapest at the time.
I would gladly buy my own DVR box if it also meant I could install a QUALITY hard disk in the damn thing, and not have to lug it to the cable office, get a replacement, and then re-program all my favorites MANUALLY (The thing has a USB port on it, but what's it for?) and re-add all my scheduled recordings.
From what I have seen, people in the middle east and north africa have had this for ages. And, on a related note: mobile service providers like Vodafone have nothing to do with the actual handsets people buy from various vendors. You simply insert standard SIM cards and can swap them between phones.
These people can never understand restrictions like the one that has just been removed, and for a good reason: they don't make sense. Is there some sort of survey of the countries that have a standard de-linking between service provision and hardware? It would be interesting to know.
When we had Digeo's MOXI HD DVR through Charter, my biggest beef was that its feature set was completely dictated by the cable company. One example is the "skip" button on the remote. Many DVR's have a 30 or so second skip button. MOXI has the capability of having a 30-second skip button on the remote (actually, the box could be configured to pretty much any skip value) but the value is specified by the cable company, not the consumer. The bottom line was that Charter felt that it was in their best interest to make it a 15 minute (yes, minute) skip instead of a 30-second skip.
By opening this up, it could provide consumers with more choice on features.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
Good. This should pave the way for mobile phones to be operator agnostic.
What a coincidence.
There's been several stories about Microsoft releasing it's "Windows Home Server". Which, with the right MS approved hardware, sounds like it'll replace a whole cabinette full of dedicated entertainment devices including the set-top box.
If I was cynical, I could too-easily imagine a future where every sports team I watched and every musician I listened to (on my way-innovative Windows Communication Console) was owned by Microsoft.
That'd bring a totally new and all-encompassing meaning to the term "Windoze".
They can and will always be able to cut you off for any reason. It says so right in the contract. Same with most ISPs that cut off people who use way too much bandwidth (AOL). It says they don't need a reason to cut you off, they just can whenever they want "by their discretion." So yeah you won't get fined or go to jail for using a custom cable box that steals HBO, but they can stop giving you service all they want so it's still pretty pointless.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
"The FCC rendered a decision today against a Comcast appeal that centers on integrated security features in set-top cable boxes. The decision comes at the end of a long standing feud between the FCC and cable companies over the matter. "
Whaaat!? Is this the same FCC that slashdot claims is in bed with big business? How dare they bite the hand that buys them.
I mean, the Comcast one I have works great! It only took ten minutes to program it to record "The Office" this evening. It showed it as a season pass, but didn't indicate it was going to record tonight's until I set a manual recoding. There were no scheduling conflicts....it apparently just didn't like tonight's episode.
To make matters worse, the *reason* I'm programming the DVR right now is because it deleted all of its content and scheduled recordings last week.
And the formerly fast user interface is now running quite slow. Unplugging/having Comcast reset it does not improve the situation.
It'll be going straight back to Comcast once I get my MythTV set up.
What has *science* done?!? -- Dr. Weird (ATHF)
This sucks. Now we'll will probably miss out on further Comcast innovations, DRM, and lower prices in the future. :-(
In Australia, if you want the PVR function, you have to pay Foxtel A$500 for a box you don't even own.
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
I'm old enough to remember when cable came out in Omaha, Nebraska. You had to lease a special cable box with pushbuttons on it that tuned the channels. Eventually everyone got standardized and the various CECs (Consumer Electronics Companies) started building support for the 70 odd "standard" cable channels right into the Televisions and VCRs of the day allowing you to tune pretty much anything without leasing a box from the cable company.
With digital cable the cable companies recreated the same situation they had in the late seventies and early eighties. You have to have the digital box in order to get the digital channels. Which not coincidentally is where they hide most of the "good" channels. Why did they do this? Well, a lot of reasons but trust me when I tell you that the charge for leasing the cable box you need to tune your channels isn't making them feel bad.
With this decision the CECs of the world can get busy putting standardized digital receivers back into Televisions and the DVR. It's about damned time too.
given the cable company doesn't make it easy to get a CC
You know, for a moment there, I thought CC meant credit card. Just what we need, cable companies issuing credit cards. Hmm... I give it about five years.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Why is everyone complaining about not having choices?
1. You can get a cable box or DVR from your cable company
2. You can get a TiVo Series 3 with HD and CableCard support right now, no cable boxes needed.
3. You can get a standard DVR and have it control your cable box via IR control.
4. You can get DirecTV or Dish and use their PVRs
5. You can get DirecTV or Dish and use your own DVR with IR control.
6. FIOS, U-Verse, whatever else is on the way...
7. This is Slashdot - build your own PVR that automatically gathers content via a Perl script from thousands of sources worldwide.
I hate the cable and satellite companies as much as the next person, but the issue isn't that there aren't choices.
This is basically a monopoly, so opening up the market for this (or any) product creates competition, which generally drives down prices and creates innovation (i.e. new cool features).
Maybe they could come up with something better than the HR20 DVR that Directv is cramming down everyone's throats with a 2 year agreement. It would be nice to use a TIVO Series 3 on Directv.
actually cablecards DO provide 2-way communication ... it's the boxes (largely TVs at this point) that they are embedded in that don't. This is largely the cable companies fault as it's their entity "Cable Labs" that specs cablecard and they've chosen restrictions that make it MUCH harder to make 2-way boxes
What you mean mean you no like Borat?
Borat is your friend. I am sixth most famous man from Kazikstan.
How come you no like him? I am come to Amerika to find friend and prostitutes to take home with me. You are not friend then you be prostitute?
Borat am still your friend. Come to Kazikstan and you get good welcome party, no?
"Cats like plain crisps"
I really can't figure out why the cable companies are so against this. Most people who use DVR functions don't like the DVRs from the cable companies (or the dish companies for that matter), there is a lot of equipment that has to be warehoused and maintained, and there's no indication that there will be rampant theft of service if boxes are sold at Best Buy (there is not much evidence of people stealing Internet service, for example, and the one big example was due to a security hole that should have been plugged long before the cable modems were released anyway). Typically, about 50% of the subscriber base has at least one set top box. The long term for cable companies is that 100% of the televisions connected to a cable system will have a set top box (all digital service). That is an enourmous amount of equipment that has to be bought by the cable company, inventoried by the cable company, installed by the cable company (or fixed when the subscriber doesn't install it correctly), recovered by the cable company, and warehoused by the cable company. 10,000 set top boxes take up a lot of room in the warehouse.
Now compare that to the cable card: you buy a set top box. You take it home and call the cable company. They come out and make sure the signal is OK (at least they should), install a PCMCIA-like card in the back, show you what channels you get, and if it doesn't work, well, that's your problem. Or, if you are feeling adventurous, you stop by the cable company office on the way home with your new box and pick up a cable card.
The cable cards are kept in a large safe in the back of the office. The office manager and GM get bigger offices. The extra warehouse guys start doing installs. Live, while not good, is getting better.
All this is possible now with one way cards. When the second part of OpenCable is implemented (2 way cards, DOCSIS communications) you will see set tops in the stores. Hopefully it will be very soon. Comcast is fighting this because the back office stuff isn't ready... In fact I don't know that any equipment is certified for Opencable at this time. The TiVO box might be, but I'm not sure, and I think might not be due to the fact that there's no equipment to test it on. And don't forget the billing systems...
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
I've had to endure the worst version ever for these damned Scientific Atlanta cable boxes. I use them with standalone TiVo boxes, but I've had to disable Suggestions and pad all recordings by a minute before and after just to get them to work with the latest update forced upon me by Time Warner Cable.
It's all about their new guide data system. Now, if you try to change the channel at the hour or half hour when the channel you're leaving has another show coming on, the data update can throw out some or all of the digits your TiVo sent to the box so you are left on the same channel or tuned to the wrong channel, both cases recording the wrong show.
But that's not the worst of it! Another failure mode is the cable box crashing, restarting, and staying off until you physically press the power button again. *Every* *single* *Wednesday* *morning* the box crashes as a result of TiVo recording their Teleworld Paid Program without any padding and I have to make sure to turn them back on again before I go to work.
Further, I've had it crash twice on HBO without an attempt to change channels, both right after the last two episodes of Real Time, so even if I could find a way to bias the TiVo by 5-10 seconds to avoid the critical window, spontaneous crashes will still occur!
Time Warner Cable is completely unsympathetic and doesn't give a damn about my complaints, not even to roll back my boxes to a functioning revision. I'd go buy a Series3 and get two unidirectional cable cards if I could afford it now and had assurance that the same glitch won't follow me to those cards. (I don't give a damn about PPV or other OnDemand programming and have thought about putting a unidirectional trap on the line to keep my boxes from requesting their guide data.)
I'm even considering switching to DirecTV, even though I've seen how much they compress the hell out of animated programming to practical unwatchability.
I'm not sure I can even last until July when I can (theoretically) get my own cable box and return their buggy units.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
like this?
I just hope the suckers keep paying so my cable internet prices stay low. Who watches TV, I mean force fed advertisements, anymore?
Try and downgrade from digital to analog cable. Comcast will make you return the box, and not just to your nearest comcast location, it seems they arbitrarily pick one a long way off.
I'm remarkably happy with my $11/month basic cable from them. Even figuring in Tivo, i'm running about a third of what their cheapest digital service would cost me.
Cell phones are that way because of the evil government!
If it weren't for communist anticapitalist regulation, you could create your own cell phone network made of home made transmission satellites launched from your backyard and supplement it with your own makeshift cell phone towers on the ground.
It's government regulation that prevents it. Ok, and satellite overcrowding in space... and the issue of getting fuel for launching satellites... and finding a factory to manufacture your cell phone... hmmmmm...
[capitalist parody off]
Informative post. The only part I don't get is why I am forced by the satellite companies to only get my local affiliates rather than any of their other city affiliates. For example, I like to get the Washington DC locals but I can't because I live in Phoenix. If it's coming from space, why is it regulated in this respect?
By forcing cable companies to use CableCards themselves, the FCC will also force the cable industry to make CableCards actually work correctly. If the industry is given a choice between no VOD and making CableCard VOD work, they will find a way to make it work.
So great. You can get a box from vendor X and put it on network Y. You wont see anything on it though. Apart from the differing protocols used in the US on digital cable (unlike DVB in Europe). They have different encryption standards too. You can put your card in but you wont decrypt anything because the box wont support that network. And I can really see the cable companies ditching all their legacy equipment to standardise on one system. It's cheaper just to pay fines.
You *could* have a box that supported all the networks but you'd have to get the encryption companies working together which isn't going to happen in a month of Sundays. They are arch rivals who keep their IP extremely secret. Many aren't American and so aren't tied by the laws there either so don't give a shit what the FCC say.
This will run and run.
Does this ruling apply to FIOS as well? Verizon is digging my neighborhood right now... But I'd like hte same possibility of box choice if I get FIOS TV as this would allow with Comcast.
Will this allow TV tuner cards for computers that take cable cards? Which are usable with Linux and MythTV?
I've got a MythTV box with two of the pcHDTV 3000 cards. Is there any way to make use of this with FIOS to record HD programming? Will there be such a thing as a FIOS "tuner card" for computers?
I leased a Motorola DCT-6412 from Comco$t for a while, and while the remote they supplied did not have a 30-second skip button, I found that Logitech (I have their Harmony 676 remote) had a codeset with a 30-second skip code that worked. (The Harmony line allows you to load codesets from their web site, and also lets you move any function to any button.) As a ReplayTV DVR owner, it was bad enough not being able to jump to a specific time or jump forward or back X minutes, but the skip forward/back made it tolerable.
If this comes up again and you get a programmable remote, check www.avsforum.com or www.remotecentral.com for additional codes.
[command INSERTWITTYQUIP failed: insufficient wit]
Two way cable cards are not required for any DRM feature. All the cable card needs to do is decrypt incoming feeds. It only ever needs to be a one way device. All of the other protocol and switching negotiations can be done by a processor/transmitter outside the cable card. This, of course, would require open service APIs to the Cable Co.'s network, so it may never happen. The only reason we need two-way cable cards is to put the entirety of existing cable boxes inside the cable card, thus preserving the exact same level of control that the cable companies have without the integration ban.
If the cards were unidirectional, and the cable companies had to provide open specs for requesting content from their networks, this would also allow for pay-per-view and on-demand content to be ordered without a bidirectional card.
The whole point of the card is supposedly to protect the content while allowing third-party set top box innovation, so any claim that data originating on the customer's end of the connection also needs to be protected by the card is completely bogus. The integration ban should stand, and it should specify unidirectional cable cards.
This may sound like a good idea but herein lies the problem:
1) This only applies to cable companies, not to IPTV (eg, ATT and Verizon does not have to change a thing)
2) Guess who lobbied very heavily for this? See companies listed above.
3) Cable boxes like the Motorola DCT 700 that can go for as little as $3.95/month may go up several dollars per month for the cable companies to get their money back outfitting their existing inventory.
Any cable box that has been in a home prior to July 1 will be grandfathered in. This means you will see cable companies all across North America be virtually giving away cable boxes free for months to get them exempt. When those run out, or if they don't make it out before July 1, you will have customers all over complaining why they have to pay $10/mo for a cable box when their neighbor has one for $4.
This is just absolutely ridiculous.
Purchase a cable box/cable card? Are you joking? They constantly obsolete themselves and it's not worth the money yet (think of trying to purchase a cable modem in 1999)and even then you will still have to pay a monthly fee for the guide data that is included in the box. (Remember this is a business, they are not going to comp this for customers, they get charged per subscriber).
Does anyone remember the Telecommunications act of 1996? The idea was to HELP the consumer, not hurt them. Way to go FCC, you've managed to make things as difficult as possible for the consumer again.
I have Cox Cable. Good service, great HDTV service, crappy - and I mean, absolutely the worst piece of shit device I have ever used in my life - DVR.
I can not overstate how great it would be to have a 2nd option. ANYTHING is better than the POS Motorola (Passport) DVR I have in the cabinet now. Tivo3 is enticing - but expensive. It's great news that there is a possible 3rd, 4th, and 5th option somewhere down the line.
My DVR makes me want to stab people in the eyes with wooden forks. It is, literally, painful for me to use it. It makes me want to jam the remote in a Motorola's executive's anus everytime I have a 2 second delay. And that's a lot.
for example, lots of satellite customers will move to cable to use cablecards with the tivo S3...
especially now that directv has dropped tivo, the best Tivo set top box now is the TivoS3...
music - http://www.subatomicglue.com
I see now, after doing some research (Googling), that the problem here is that we jumped straight from the Passport software right past Sara to Mystro (a.k.a. Time Warner Digital Navigator), TWC's attempt to roll their own software. And worse, I'm in a market where they decided to inflict beta versions of the software upon us (Lincoln, NE).
So it seems my opt-out choices are: get rid of digital cable, get a TiVo Series3 and use CableCards to get away from their software (maybe, and give up TiVoToGo functionality), or switch to satellite, because despite being drafted into their beta test, they don't seem interested in my feedback.
It's almost as if TWC wants this software to discourage people from using their own DVRs and instead rent theirs. But surely they wouldn't deliberately engage in such an anticompetitive practice and abuse their localized monopolies, would they?
In any case, thank you, CheSara, for taking an interest in my plight. Alas, it seems I have little to no choice over the issue, at least until July, barring industry appeals.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
They are convenient, but they're not as convenient as they should be. One of their chief features is also a drawback: they're tiny.
The best solution, which does not exist in any form, would be that all you have to do is hold the new phone next to the old phone and press a button. The technology's all in place (in phones even) for that already: bluetooth, public key encryption, uh.. buttons...
And the critical data shouldn't be just on the phone anyway. You should be able to access and edit a copy of the phone's phonebook through a web interface, which would get sync'd with the phone every so often. Then you wouldn't have such a hassle entering in everybody's info again every time you accidentally wash one. Heck, with mobile bandwidth the way it is, you should be able to access the phone's everything via the web. Interface cable? why?
Frankly, what surprises me is that no one has come in and undercut the phone companies byzantine pricing schemes by offering all that, on a phone/data-link (i mean it's already a data-link, all you'd need is a USB connector and the right drivers to turn it into a proper one) with unlimited calling for a low price. Sort of like a wireless vonage... I guess we'll see if it happens after the FCC clears out some frequencies for sale.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!