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Comcast Facing Lawsuit Over Set-Top Box Rentals
Multichannel News reports that a woman from California has initiated a potential class-action lawsuit against Comcast for making customers rent a set-top box without giving them the option to buy it outright. Quoting:
"The action, on behalf of Comcast Corp. customer Cheryl Corralejo, alleges that the set-top rental practice represents an 'unlawful tying arrangement resulting in an impermissible restraint of trade.' In addition to violating the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, the suit alleges the practice violates business and professions codes. ... [It also notes] that premium video and the set-top descramblers are two distinct products, yet the cable providers require that the hardware be rented from cable companies, rather than permitting consumers to purchase the set-top hardware in the open market.
At least with Comcast here in Florida, you can install it on the TiVo's yourself so you don't have to wait. I did it with two TiVo HD XLs. I went and picked up two mstream cards from Comcast (one was free, the second $1.99/month) and got home and stuck it in. You do have to then call them up and give them some information from the card like its serial number and a network ID. It took about 20 minutes on the phone with them to do both cards. Then the lady sent the information off to someone to "activate" it. About an hour later it was working and they called back to let me know and have me check 2 or 3 channels on each TV.
Ideally you should plug it in and it would work. The process would be too complicated for many people, my aunts, grandparents etc. Making it plug and play is an important step for adoption.
The other problem is that it does not support "OnDemand" which I know a lot of people enjoy.
It's far from "obvious" that this is an antitrust violation. All Comcast has to do is show that cable TV and set top boxes are not separate products, and *poof* the antitrust suit disappears. No court will ever find a shoe store in violation of the Sherman Act because they are "tying" left and right shoes.
The other big complication is market power. For a tying case, the plaintiff must show market power in the tying product. The trouble is defining the market. If the market is cable television services, then Comcast clearly has market power. But if the market is home entertainment services, then market power is far from clear.
Antitrust litigation is very complicated, and "obvious" violations are rare.
IANAL, but I am a law student who took antitrust law this past semester.
So leave Comcast and get some decent hardware. Might I recommend Dish Network and the DVR722 receiver?
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Who wants to BUY a cable box they force you to use? The real issue is that the cable companies want to force you to use THEIR SELECTED equipment. Since there is little or no competition with cable, what consumers need and want is freedom to use the EQUIPMENT of their own choosing. THAT would make a far better lawsuit.
I have a TiVo HD. Let me tell you, it was a nightmare trying to get it to work properly with Cox Cable. You think that CableCard solved the issues? Think again. There are different versions of the card and issues with resetting them and the techs are CLUELESS. But then Cox activated SDV (Shared Digital Video) the week after I FINALLY got everything working. Poof- I could then not access 2/3rds of the HD channels. Cox couldn't tell me WHY I couldn't get the stations, and kept sending out useless techs. Then they tried to charge me for the service calls. After many hours on the phone, I FINALLY got someone who actually knew what they were doing.
They activated SDV without telling any customers or even training their techs what they were doing and instantly made it impossible for anyone not using Cox equipment to get many channels. It completely ruined the whole concept of CableCards. And Cox was not the only cable company doing it, either.
Well, it was my great fortune that after a few weeks of that hell, Cox suddenly stopped using SDV and then everything worked again. I heard through my inside connections that Cox was having problems with some of their own equipment and SDV, so they temporarily stopped using it. It hasn't been a year yet, but rest assured that Cox will start using SDV again, and then every customer with an HDTV + cablecard, or TiVO + cablecard, or any other type of non-Cox equipment will be out in the cold yet again.
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I'm going though this headache now. I called up Comcrap to order an m-stream CableCard, and the idiot sales person had no idea what I was talking about. I asked for a supervisor, who claimed that they only had m-stream cards in California. I told her to put on my work request that I wanted an m-stream card. I called sales later in the day, and she even called down to dispatch to verify that my work order had a request for an m-stream card. Very nice and knowledgeable installer comes out with 2 s-stream cards. He says, of course they have m-cards. His dispatcher made a note on my account saying that I requested an M-stream card and they should have delivered one. They had suggested that hopefully Comcast would just not charge me for the second card, but after talking with their billing department, the person said while they could do that, I would be better off getting an m-stream card so that I don't have problems every month, so now they are bringing out a m-stream card.
Of course, Comcrap is now charging you the same monthly fee as a stupid damn box, because they are calling it a "digital outlet" fee.
unfortunately, while they are using the cable card in their cable boxes for access, there is still software in their cable boxes that is doing 2-way communication and other functionality, so while cablecard gets you access, it won't be until tru2way until there is true 2-way support where you can get On-Demand, etc. There are tuning adapters which are an external device to allow something like Tivo to support switched video, but of course, because their boxes use cablecard _and_ bi-directonal communication, they don't require the external adapter.
This will be a little hard to explain, so I'll try and be as sensible as possible. There are "must carry" regulations that control what Cables can and can't scramble. They have to Carry local channels and they have to carry stations like TBS in an unscrambled/unencrypted format. (my significant other and I have had many arguements about this.) "Scrambling" is an Analogue concept that applied to Analog NTSC Cable. Cable companies don't do this any more, they simply stick it on the "Digital Teir" and encrypt the shit out of it. Digital Cable" uses QAM. (Quadurature Amplitude Modulation.) QAM gets encrypted heavily by cable companies.
Now, most Digital Televisions, and Digital VCRs (but not those cheap DTV Converters) have QAM tuners (call this "Digital Cable Ready") in addition to ATSC Tuners (Digital Terrestrial Tuners.)
Now must of these "Digital Cable Boxes" that the cable company provides, output ONLY Analogue RF NTSC out, (at 480p) or Composite out. (also 480p.) if you want 720p or 1080i, you have to get one of their "HD" packages to get a "box" with Component or HDMI output. (so its the digital cable boxes that prevent just everyone subscribing to get "HD".
Here is the problem. The Cable companies consider their QAM tier to be entirely Premium channels all 100+ of them. So they feel entitled to encrypt the whole thing. Not only that, they are moving regular NTSC Channels to the Digital Teir and encrypting them. Save the ones that under the US's must carry Rule. (I think Canada is as variation of the way.)
Now here is the killer, while there is no hard and fast date for this like the Febuary 17th 2009 switch, its expected the Analogue Cable teirs will go dark some time in 2012 or 2013. So what we are likely to see sometime in that year, is a situation where maybe 20 local channels and must carry nationals are in Clear QAM, and virtually everything else is Encrypted. And there is no Analogue Teir at all. Without a set top Box rental, you will be better off watching OTA ATSC, and not subscribing to cable at all.
That is the future of Television.
That's not at all how cable works. All channels are always available on cable, because it is shared with everyone in your neighborhood. A cable technician installs filters at your demarc point, which screen out the channels you are not paying for. If you were to break into that box and remove the filters, you would receive all channels.
The 2-way communication features are indeed useless to you, as I'm assuming your never consume pay-per-view programming, but they are critical for digital cable where a significant portion of the content is delivered on-demand, and access is governed not by physical filters but by software. In general, any functionality that is unique to you must be transmitted via this 2-way link, otherwise everyone else will get them too.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
It's a shame CableCard never caught on - then companies like TiVO could have offered a viable alternative to a set top box.
Um, companies like TiVO do offer alternatives. I'm using a TiVO HD with cableCARD right now, as a matter of fact.
Comcast box is even more crappy.
Do discreet on and off IR codes, no RS232 control port in back. PIP does not work, etc... as a high end theater integrator I hate it when my $50,000 theater install turns into a $25.00 piece of crap home theater in a box when it comes to the cable box control. The POS has video out on all ports if on or off, so I cant do a video detect. It uses the same power on or off so I cant use a current detect, and they have so many useless led's always on on the face I cant use a indicator detect. No ir in port in theback means running a ugly bug to the front.
Even their newest box is utterly a festering pile of dog crap. AND they try and rape customers by telling them that it's a $900.00 box. It's barely worth $49.95 on the open market and they know it. Oh and finally most HDMI boxes give "USECURED VIDEO PATH" errors on many TV's causing people to revert to Component in instead of HDMI.
There is not one box available from comcast that is not a total piece of junk that is not worth the cardboard box it was shipped in. This is the fault of Motorola making low end boxes (no cooling on the hard drives so they fail all the time in the DVR boxes)
Problem is there is not other choices. DISH and DirectTV both have really crappy hardware, and all other cable companies have the same motorola or Scientiffic Atlanta crap.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I think the point is she wants the market open so she could buy a cable box from any company not just Comcast.
Sort of like telephones way back when. You had use to have to rent your phone from the phone company. The laws changed that tying arrangement too so now you go to K-Mart or BestBuy or wherever and buy any phone you want.
Can anybody imagine a renting a phone these days from your phone company in order to use the service you pay for?
Hmm, do you have to pay a montly "rental" fee for that card from Comcast though or can I get the card anywhere?
No, and No. Comcast--at least here in Lansing, MI--offers teh first cablecard for free, and the second one for like $1.99. When I had digital cable installed, I specifically told them I wanted a multi stream card that way I wouldn't have to pay the fee for the second card.
I also asked if I could install the thing myself, but they declined. I suspect less a technical issue than them wanting to charge the install fee.