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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.
CableCARD exists. TiVos use it. The failure of it to take over has nothing to do with the open market. It's because cable is not an open market. CableCARD was forced on the cable companies by the FCC and they didn't want it, so they responded by doing the worst possible job in supporting it.
Friends who have TiVos mention having to wait almost two weeks for a CableCARD "install" where a guy shows up with a card and just puts it in your TiVo. When they easily could have just given you the card on the spot.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
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.
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.
Streaming Media is a huge hog of bandwidth, as the ISPs in the UK are discovering with the iPlayer [wikipedia.org] and other services. The ISPs and the content providers are currently in disagreement [theregister.co.uk] as to who should pay to upgrade the network infrastructure
In the good old days, people minded their own business. If you had a hot dog stand where you sold the best hot dogs at a busy intersection, the butcher didn't come to your stand to whine and moan about how he can't produce more hot dogs unless you bribe him. He just took all the money he earned from his supply business and reinvested it to increase capacity, and you kept on selling hot dogs without worrying about anything else.
If there is more demand on ISPs to deliver bandwidth to support their customer's usage, it is their responsibility to increase capacity to meet demand. If they cannot afford to do so, then it is the business model that is flawed. If they failed to account for future upgrades and the rather obvious explosion of telecommunications, that makes them poor businesspeople. It most certainly is not the fault of the customer nor anyone else.
-Billco, Fnarg.com