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Comcast Disables VCR Scheduling In New Guide
An anonymous reader writes "Comcast has quietly launched a new on-screen guide for its cable boxes. What they're not advertising is that they've removed the ability to schedule VCR-compatible channel flipping any time more than a few hours in advance for people who don't buy the $20/month DVR service. What this means is that VCR owners are now forced to pay for Comcast's $20/month DVR service or else start their recordings manually. For us techies there might be a way around this, but ordinary VCR enthusiasts and owners of other recorders are left in the dust. Anyone know a good antitrust lawyer?" Raise your hand if you regularly use a VCR these days, too.
Who cares about the VCR's. People still watch television without downloading it?
'cause the free market fixes everything. the invisible hand of the market will even stop invading tanks as long as you wish it hard enough
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Seen in a variety of places in the tech business, and businesses with a lot of underlying technology.
Here is how it works: Because technology is complex, most users are largely helpless, and incapable of realizing much of the theoretical promise of the technology available. A fairly small population of gearheads(and, if said gearheads happen to be motivated in setting up UIs, immediate friends and family of such) can realize the potential; but most cannot. At this point, you create a product that, by making things easy, gives Joe Sixpack 90% of what Jim Gearhead has always been able to do, available at the touch of a button. The last 10%, though, you take away from both Joe and Jim, in the form of DRM and/or fees. Because the population of gearheads is much smaller than the population at large, you get to look like you are "enabling new capabilities, for which you are charging a fair price/making a few reasonable concessions to content providers", even as you are, in fact, turning the screws a little tighter.
Historically, Apple has been perhaps the most talented player of this game, but there are certainly plenty of others. It's evil, certainly; but it works quite well.
It is the existence, and success, of this strategy that makes me think that user-friendliness may be a necessary survival trait for FOSS. If we can make Jim Gearhead's 100% solution easy to use, then the public at large will see the various crippled or fee-based(often both) almost-as-good-but-easier offerings as the steps down that they are, and protest loudly. If we can't, though, the companies that deliver them will, largely, receive acquiescence or even praise for doing so.
I find it more interesting to consider why it doesn't generally work that way. I have only one answer: we care a HELL of a lot more about immediate convenience and instant gratification than we have ever cared about being consistent with our principles. So we'll buy from abusive companies that deliver poor service before we'll do without their products/services. We'll patronize a company that is known to engage in extremely dishonorable business practices so long as their products are 5% cheaper than the competitors'.
The market idea really could work, except that it requires a people who are both more noble and have a far stronger backbone than our general population. Such a people would individually and voluntarily refuse to ever support any business that takes actions which are not in their interests, at all costs. In turn, the corporations would understand this which would both raise the general standard and guarantee that actually proving this to them would be a relatively rare event.
But we want our shiny and we want it now and we don't care what sort of behavior we are rewarding by voting with our wallets. That's the only reason it doesn't work. There is none other. Corporations cannot act against our interests except that we provide the funding by which they do it.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
It's worse than that, though. Not only does Comcast have a functional monopoly(or at least cozy duopoly) in a large number of its service areas, infrastructure construction is fundamentally subject to economic phenomena that encourage monopoly formation.
Building infrastructure has very high barriers to entry and substantially greater build-out costs than operating costs. This means that any prospective entrant needs deep pockets just to lay the wires, and also means that the incumbent, who has already had time to amortize build-out costs, can generally threaten to undercut possible entrants quite deeply for a period of time.
Once you add on the not-strictly-economic-but-hard-to-eradicate-in-the-real-world issues of easements and things(since building most kinds of infrastructure more or less necessarily requires trampling all over other people's property, building towers, putting up poles, or digging ditches, you either have the truly epic barrier to entry of having to negotiate individually with all propertyholders, or the local state-entity uses its power to take and bundle compulsory rights-of-way, which substantially lowers barriers to entry; but makes control over all rights of way a political football at the state or municipal level, which generally comes down to a further advantage to the incumbent).
Frankly, I suspect that we would have a much freer market if building out fiber were generally treated as a state function, as roads and water lines are. The municipality would run the fiber from you to a peering point. By default, the fiber would just sit there, possibly offer access to some municipal web sites. If you chose, you could contract with any private party operating at that peering point(which would make room available on a RAND basis) and a simple router config change would allow traffic between your fiber and one or more of the parties at the peering point. You want internet access? Talk to any of the ISPs at your peering point. TV? Any IPTV provider, whether at that peering point, or through an ISP, can sell you that. Phone? VOIP through your ISP, or a dedicated provider if you don't want to get your hands dirty.
All the municipality would have to do is keep the fiber lit, and pass traffic through it. Competition at the peering point could be nice and stiff(since laying fat pipes to a single location, properly chosen, is way cheaper than laying thin pipes to hundreds of locations, and because various service providers could lease bulk bandwidth from each other to offer services). As with rule of law and other flavors of infrastructure, the actual line-to-premises is arguably one of those places where state intervention is the foundation of a good free market, not the opposite of one.
I find it more interesting to consider why it doesn't generally work that way.
Two words: Market Power
It has nothing to do with "backbone", or "caring". It has to do with the fact that consumers really don't have as much power as free-market proponents believe.
what i find really is your argument for a truly 'free market' is really reminiscent of a lot of arguments for communism that i've heard, in the sense that "it would work great, if only human beings thought and acted differently than they actually do."
No, it has to do with the fact that we don't have as much free-market as anti-free-market whiners like to tell us we do. You can't strongly regulate an industry and then claim that free market failed.
e.g. cable television, insurance, pharmacuticals, power production, power distribution, etc, etc, etc.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
For free markets to have any chance to make the world a better place, i.e. to give people good stuff as cheaply as possible, consumers as a group must be informed. They're not, by and large. Consumers in general consume what the constant barrage of propaganda tells them to consume.
Money is power: Power to form monopolies, power to persuade, power to shape ideas and world views.
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
There's also the minor issue that, when one does nothing but "vote with one's dollar," the company has no way to know why. Or that without some sort of overarching organization, people find out about things that piss them off at different times, and so the relation of action to reaction is spread over time to the point that it, again, becomes completely opaque.
We've tried laissez-faire capitalism - it's called the Gilded Age, and it was TERRIBLE for 90% of the population. Previously, we tried it in Edwardian/Victorian Britain. It was horrible and soul-crushingly destructive then, too. Sensing a theme? Pure free market economies are no better an idea than communism, if somewhat more efficient at producing products.
This is a particularly bad argument when talking about cable TV - often, the consumer doesn't HAVE an alternative readily available; I can count the number of places I've been that offer multiple cable TV services on one hand, and I've lived places where satellite wasn't a real option because of geography or various out-of-my-control circumstances.
Corporations can act against our interests in a variety of ways without being immediately funded by those affected, particularly when a corporation has existed long enough and had enough pull to shape society or law in its favor. A good example is credit card companies - while there's no de jure requirement that I have one, if I don't build a credit history, I can't buy a house or car or get loans for school or...
Regardless, even if everything you said was correct, that's still a problem with Libertarianism, not with consumers. Because, well, any system that only works in the platonic world of perfect ideals is a stupid, worthless system, and not worth consideration in this, the real world.
No, it requires a people infinitely resourceful, a people infinitely knowledgable about the actions of the corporations (and parent companies and subsidiaries) they interact with, even tangentially, and a people that can make their primary activity "making purchasing decisions" rather than work, or raising a family, or anything that is actually central to a real human's life. Also, these mythical people would still need to build a solid method for communicating the reasons behind their purchasing decisions, en masse, to the companies. Making purchasing decisions based solely in a political manner isn't some beautiful, virtuous thing, and doing so based on your own needs isn't immoral.
People not only won't buy things and services primarily according to abstract principles and disagreements, they shouldn't have to. There's no reason why, when deciding what car to buy, I should have to do thirty hours worth of research to see if the company making my car purchases child-slaves in East Examplia and grinds them up for lubricant - the laws of my country (and the world) should make unethical behavior illegal. That's what laws and regulations are for.
A much better idea would be to have the city lay out it's grid (cable, internet, telephone, etc) and then lease its usage to competing companies, The infrastructure becomes an investment that the community has, and is able to profit from. All potential lessees would be charged the same amount for usage of components of the grid, thus you have the same base rate for each company, then they each have to figure in the profit margin etc... no need to explain this any further.
I realize this is a corruptible system, at the same time, it would be a self correcting system, as the community can decide which is offering the best service for the price.
There would be a large "up front" Investment here, but would pay for it self, especially when you get a large number of companies on the same grid.
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We haven't put it to the test in the last 100 years or so, because we learned the lesson the first time. The industrial revolution in Britain and the United States was a free-market wet-dream. No minimum wage, no worker safety, no anti-competitive status, and no child labor laws.
What happened was that industry found the sweet spot where they were just a hair better than staying on the farm (which also had none of those restrictions) so that they could run their machinery with a constant stream of new-arrivals. The result was sweat shops, child labor, company towns, tenements, slums, the reduction of the middle class (skilled workers), and massive environmental damage - all for the benefit for a few ultra-wealthy "captains of industry" like Rockefeller, Carnagie, Morgan, and Vanderbilt.
Ironically, communist China is in the process of repeating our free-market mistake.