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FCC Approves Changes To Cable Box Rules
GovTechGuy writes "The FCC issued an order Thursday that should make it much easier and cheaper for consumers to purchase and install third-party cable boxes made by manufacturers such as TiVo. The rules are aimed at spurring competition in the cable box market; currently consumers overwhelmingly choose to rent a box from their cable provider rather than buy their own. Lawmakers have complained the current cable box technology is outdated and doesn't allow consumers to leverage new sources of video content such as the Web or streaming services from providers such as Netflix. The new rules should result in a smarter, more advanced cable box in the near future."
Where do I sign up?
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
And Cable providers sue in 3...2...1
Cable and Internet providers have been ridiculously successful against the FCC for the past 15 years. It's like literally everything the FCC has tried to do has been shut down by the courts.
None of these address the "value add" (sorry, kinda puked in my mouth a little bit getting that out) that sells the consumer that they MUST GET CABLE BOX FROM CABLE COMPANY. First of all, consumers don't know they have a choice of getting a cable card, and how to get a device that supports one, and get one installed if they find the device. Secondly, consumers are told they can't get on-demand content if they don't use the cable company's device.
That's it guys. Prescheduled programming? Nobody runs into problems with this. Pricing/Billing transparency? No - this would be a problem if most consumers knew the option existed. Streamlined installation? See pricing/billing transparency. Ease requirements? No - just need to HAVE requirements.
No. This is different. It's legal.
But TiVo doesn't want that.
They're just about to release a new DirecTivo and have cowed DISH in court. TiVo doesn't want third-party competition in satellite. But because the cable companies were doing non-infringing competitive DVR boxes, TiVo was the third-party, so it wanted this access.
A business just isn't a real business until you can see the hypocrisy crusting around its mouth.
It's called an internet connection, bittorrent, and a ps3.
Really? How well does a PS3 decode encrypted HD cable channels and handle PPV content? If it functioned as a good cable box, I might just buy a PS3, despite the fact that I don't play a lot of games. Bittorrent is great, but just a tiny bit more cumbersome than simply pulling up a DVR menu or punching in a 4-digit channel number, and then there's the question of legality.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Cable ready means you can shove coax directly into the back of your TV and see stuff.
It doesn't, however, mean your TV is capable of handling the pleasant luxuries that have been developed over the past few decades - such as DVR, handling PPV content, et cetera.
Depending on where the poster lives, it may be legal for him.
The barrier isn't technological, it's psychological. My mom has a cable box she doesn't need. The installer told her she needed to get cable. I told her to take it back and demand a refund. She won't. During the 80's, you had to have a box to get channels above 13, because that was the highest a TV could tune. Then the FCC mandated cable-ready TV's, and you didn't need a box at all except for pay TV. There was no education or information given to the public, so a lot of people went through the 90's still believing they need a box, and the cablecos still play on that. The only was to solve the problem is to educate the public, something like forcing the cablecos to hand their customers a pamphlet clearly showing what channels do and do not require a box.
Hold on a moment. Cable companies are granted exclusive franchises by the city government, not the federal government. That and that alone is the reason for the abysmal service. If you had a choice between TW, Comcast, Cox, Charter, and CableVision in most cities then we would have real competition, and the prices and services would be much better.
The FCC helps to keep the cable companies acting like there is competition. If not for the FCC, there would never have been the CableCard option in the first place. The only option would be to buy the set-top box, or not be able to tune in to many of the channels you are paying for.
Sure the FCC does sometimes bend to much the the will of the media companies or cable companies, but if the FCC only regulated the actual airwaves, and not also the cable companies, Things would be much, much worse.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
Well, they should be scared that people are going to abandon their lucrative set-top box rental scam. I'm shelling out a lot of money per month just to have HD DVRs from Comcast. These are buggy, buggy pieces of Motorola crap that I just can't wait to get rid of.
The worst part is the abuse of their monopoly position. With 1080 lines of resolution at their disposal, they manage to squeeze five (5!) whole channel listings at a time onto the program guide screen. They reserve the bottom 20% of the guide for inane advertisements. They refuse to allow me to remove the shitty channels I will never watch from the lineup. They do not let me reorder the channels in a fashion that makes logical sense to me. There's a whole pile of annoyances that grate every time I touch the remote. We even have a list of activities we don't dare do, lest we send the cable box into some kind of tailspin while it's recording. And for this crap software, I pay them continually.
I always liked my ReplayTVs much better than any Tivo I ever used, but anything else has got to be a damn site better than these awful things.
John
Remember those?
I'd kill to have a setup that my 75-year old mother could actually use. (She's just never going to be able to get the idea of separate components, and I've never found a "universal" remote control that she can use.)
Monopolistic a$$hats.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Hooking up a PVR should be no more complicated than hooking up a VCR used to be.
All of the nonsense "standardization" that has been created by the industry and the FCC is nothing more than a monopoly on a silver platter.
The connection between the cable box and the TV should be in the clear. THAT should be mandated by the FCC.
I should be able to record off of a cable box with a $30 ATSC tuner.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
What is illegal about an internet connection? What is illegal about bittorrent? What is illegal about a PS3? Come to think about it... What is illegal about a window? What is illegal about a brick? What is illegal about me throwing that brick through the window? Careful here..... It is my window.... and my brick....
Protip2: Then the FCC rule won't apply to them and any posts here are off topic trolls (in addition to the fact that Slashdot officially considers itself to be American and the largest single readership is American), unless made with a disclaimer similar to "I'm not in the US, but..."
P.S. I'm not in the USA.
Learn to love Alaska
Remember the days of renting your dial telephone from the Ma Bell?
Allowing other manufacturers to create phones initially resulted in a slew of sub-standard, crappy telephones. After a short period of growing pains, touch-tone phones appeared and grew in popularity. This innovation was further enjoined by cordless phones.
I wonder what kind of antiquated phones we'd be stuck with today if we were still renting phones from a single provider.
How amazing, powerful and inexpensive can cable boxes become now that they're open to competition.