FCC To Allow Cable Companies To Encrypt Over-the-Air Channels

alen writes "The FCC is now allowing cable companies to encrypt free OTA channels that they also rebroadcast over their networks. 'The days of plugging a TV into the wall and getting cable are coming to an end. After a lengthy review process, the FCC has granted cable operators permission to encrypt their most basic cable programming.' Soon the only way to receive free OTA channels via your cable company will involve renting yet another box or buying something like Boxee."

Comments

Do Not Want

[halfEvilTech]

well there goes my HTPC build. For those that like to build their own media centers, dvr's, etc this is utter crap. Of course I can spend $200 to get a tuner card that will accept a M-type cable card but then that is yet another piece of equipment that I have to rent from said cable company.

who wants to bet said FCC people have coushy jobs lined up at some major cable company.

Re:Do Not Want

[Lumpy]

NO you are just using the wrong recorder....

eztv.it, set up the RSS feed and your torrent catcher.

Screw the cable companies and dish companies. Best $12.95 a month I spend is for a VPN outside the USA to get all the TV shows I want to record off of my DishTV.

Re:Do Not Want

[h4rr4r]

Don't give up on the HTPC, give up on cable instead.

Get yourself an OTA tuner, amazon/netflix/hulu plus and go for it. Unless you are addicted to some sport that is not OTA it really is the way to go.

Re:Do Not Want

[halfEvilTech]

My recorder is fine. I cut the cord long ago. But since the line is still active to me having a cable modem this solves the issue of getting a decent antenea in order to get the OTA's. Currently I can just plug my system / TV into the wall and still pickup those said channels as they are broadcast in clearQuam as required under current regulations.

This is just a move that gives me the finger and forces me to put an ugly ass antenea on my roof in order to get semi decent reception as my town of 20k people is at least 50 miles from the nearest broadcast towers which causes all kinds of issues with reception.

Now if they can also encrypt those channels over the same line even though they are free (as i don't need a subscription to get them). Guess i go netflix only and just do the over the interwebs route.

Re:Do Not Want

[jeffmeden]

Don't give up on the HTPC, give up on cable instead.

Get yourself an OTA tuner, amazon/netflix/hulu plus and go for it. Unless you are addicted to some sport that is not OTA it really is the way to go.

HDHomeRun is the way to go; install it in your attic (where the signal is probably strong enough even if you are a ways from the tower) and enjoy it on MythTV...

Re:Do Not Want

[Alex Belits]

Cable company's DVR won't skip ads, and I value my own sanity.

Re:Do Not Want

[halfEvilTech]

not to mention way better storage options. Plus I built my box almost 2 years ago and still running strong. Most of it was off spare parts I had from prior systems lying around.

Re:Do Not Want

[h4rr4r]

How much are you spending on computers these days?

$10 a month would mean in two years a fairly reasonable HTPC would be paid for.

Re:Do Not Want

[Aardpig]

Highly recommend this setup. Have digital antenna up in roof, feed comes down to HDHomeRun in basement, and from there hooks into my Mythbox via ethernet. BTW, OTA digital quality is better than cable, since the cable companies re-compress the datastream and thereby degrade it.

Re:Do Not Want

[rollingcalf]

Except that when people build or buy an HTPC, it's usually not just for recording TV shows, it's also for playing games, music, ripped DVDs or Blu-Rays, Netflix, and other uses. The cable company's box won't do that.

Re:Do Not Want

[__aaqvdr516]

I put together my HDHomeRun with a small antenna about a month ago & dropped my DirectTV sub.

MythTV skips a little bit during playback while to MediaPortal works just fine on my old P4 machine. Windows Media Center does an excellent job as well.

My only problem is some FM interference from a local WISP. It works quite well.

I wish I could have installed the antenna in the attic. Unfortunately, whoever ran the cable decided to run it through the wall instead of the attic. I mounted it to the same pole I had a satellite dish on, it works well enough.

Re:Do Not Want

[Burdell]

Aside from the fact that this decision is crap (I agree), and you'd have to spend $$$ to get a tuner card, you might not have to pay your cable company anything for a CableCard. For example, I have Comcast (sucks, but beats my other local cable company in every way: price, channels, and quality), and they include the cost of a tuner box in many of the packages. I have a TiVo instead of one of their boxes, and I get a $2.50/month credit for customer-provided equipment.

Re:Do Not Want

[Anonymous Coward]

Best $12.95 a month I spend is for a VPN outside the USA to get all the TV shows I want to record off of my DishTV.

More, pretty please?

Re:Do Not Want

[spire3661]

47 miles out from the transmitter and i get every major network on an attic mounted $60 antenna. CBS signal looks a bit weak on the meter, but ive never had a drop out yet, and im recording their entire weekday primetime lineup(stress test, dont judge me). Im recording using a Windows 7 VM on ESXi. About once a week I run the batch of Recorded TV through a Quick Sync conversion and throw it on my web accessible NAS.

Re:Do Not Want

[spire3661]

You REALLY dont want to have users doing random computer actions on your recording device. Play blu-rays, netflix, etc is fine as long as its a specified action, but once you throw gaming into the mix, recording reliability falls right off the chart. Treating your recording device as a general purpose computer is just bad planning.

Re:Do Not Want

[hairyfeet]

Uhhh...why would it affect your HTPC? Simply use the net and get all the shows you want WHEN you want and with less commercials to boot. I have built several HTPCs for customers and between Win 7 MC Internet TV, Hulu Basic, and YouTube they have so many shows to choose from they could watch TV from sun up to sun down and never watch all the great shows out there. And that of course isn't counting using BT to get shows, this is just the legal means.

As a nice bonus you can get an E350 barebone which since you won't have to be encoding like a DVR will work great and only costs $130 for the barebone with nice case and PSU and for those that don't want to spend the money on Win 7 HP you can just download OpenELEC which has the XBMC 10 foot UI and has a prebuilt build for AMD Fusion chips like the E350, couldn't be simpler.

So I see no reason why this should affect your HTPC, its just one more reason to just buy bare cable for the net and say screw their TV offerings. I personally haven't bothered plugging in the free converter they handed me or my capture card because with Internet TV and all the shows on the net frankly there is more TV than I have hours in the day. Lately I've been on a classic kick so I'm watching Kolchak and Night Gallery here at the shop while I work. Its nice, less commercials than I deal with on cable, and couldn't be easier to do.

Re:Do Not Want

[LocalH]

Anecdotally, I have Charter's DVR and it makes no distinction between program content and commercials recorded from standard broadcasts. I can easily fast forward through ads - it's certainly no "ad-skipper" but the interface is nice and with quick reflexes, you can minimize your exposure to advertising (press play the instant you see program content come back, and it will back up a few seconds and start playing from there - it actually feels very responsive).

Re:Do Not Want

[Anonymous Coward]

At my age, I value the frequent piss breaks.

Re:Do Not Want

[amorsen]

BTW, OTA digital quality is better than cable, since the cable companies re-compress the datastream and thereby degrade it.

Surely no cable company could be that evil. OTA is fairly lousy quality because there just isn't enough bandwidth available for a decent amount of channels, so they all end up with a bit less than they should. Cable on the other hand is drowning in bandwidth, the cable companies should get almost-uncompressed streams from the providers and do their own much gentler compression, rather than even starting with the OTA signal.

There is absolutely no excuse for cable to be worse quality than OTA.

Re:Do Not Want

[Anonymous Coward]

In the US an ATSC multiplex is about 20megabit (19.2 I think). A QAM multiplex is 40megabit. Comcast squeezes 3 MPEG2 HD channels onto a single QAM multiplex. So yes, they do transcode the content.

That said, transcoding makes perfect sense. The real problem is that they're transcoding it back into MPEG2 instead of MPEG4/H.264 - and this is because they have so many old MPEG2 hd boxes out in the field. There's only so many multiplexs that can be fit on a cable from 0-1000mhz. And remember that they're sharing that with cable modems. The result is crappy MPEG2 HD, and few HD channels.

If you compare dish network's HD lineup in terms of HD channels to the cable companies, there's no comparison. But dish is using h.264.

Re:Do Not Want

[PRMan]

They all do it and they've all done it for a long time. DirecTV USED to have full HD streams at the very beginning, and they still do well on their re-compressed MP4 streams, which are very close to the original. My cable company's HD streams are horribly over-encoded like a super-cheap foreign Jackie Chan DVD.

Re:Do Not Want

[PRMan]

Actually, my DirecTV DVR will play all my UPnP/DLNA media and Pandora and YouTube and games, etc....

Re:Do Not Want

[Anonymous Coward]

There really needs to be a futures market for government corruption.

Re:Do Not Want

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd be suprised. VSB8 (OTA TV) uses about 19Mb per channel. QAM256 gives about 38Mb so you can put two ATSC streams on a single QAM 6MHz slice. Unfortunatly most cable companies put 4 to 6 on each 6MHz slice and hope you don't notice the difference.

Re:Do Not Want

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not an issue. Recording OTA HDTV is jsut streaming data from the tuner to the HDD. It's less than 3MB/second. It doesn't even show up the CPU stats.

Re:Do Not Want

[Anonymous Coward]

Or you can just get by without pay TV.

Re:Do Not Want

[LordKronos]

For the money you were going to spend on that HTPC, you could easily rent the cable company's latest greatest DVR's for literally years before you got back to even. If you want to roll your own to satisfy your inner geekiness that's one thing, but if the cable company can rent you a box that does the same thing for cheaper, you will receive no sympathy from me.

Sorry, but the cable company's DVR isn't all that powerful. Aside from the stuff they just outright don't do, like:
ability to skip commercials
archive shows indefinitely
export the files to disc to be played anywhere
stream to a phone/tablet/laptop, including live transcoding to a reduced resolution to fit device capability and bandwidth limitations
ability to combine multiple cable/satellite/OTA systems into one interface
web interface for scheduling new recordings remotely.

the things that they do handle they don't handle all that well:

Typically only 1 or 2 tuners
They're inferior at handling programs moving around in timeslots and conflict resolution
Recording rules aren't very flexible.

The recording rule flexibility is a biggie to me. Some shows change their name each season and thus need to be continually tweeked to keep recording. Some shows have no non-generic guide data at all, and thus they either don't get recorded. Some shows have guide data that is just....wrong. Curiosity is an example that comes to mind. Discovery channel refuses to actually title the show "Curiosity" in the guide, so each episode ends up looking to be it's own standalone show with it's own title. Most DVRs would have to have that handled manually, but with mythtv I can say create a rule that looks for a combination of day of week, time of day, and program genre that gets the episodes with minimal effort.

Re:Do Not Want

[tgeek]

And if you really want save some bucks on an antenna, just google "single bay gray hoverman" for plans and instructions to a sweet attic antenna you can build for about $10-$15 (assuming you have to purchase everything). Or an outdoor version that'll cost a few bucks more (pvc frame, lightning suppression etc.)

Re:Do Not Want

[spire3661]

Has nothing to do with recording disk speed or CPU, which is very low, and everything to do with 'o i jsut installed this game, but it needs a restart, ooops im recording a 2 hour movie, guess ill wait until its done before i can play.' I simply do not allow users on my recording device outside of very specific and known actions. Im not saying dont have a full fledged HTPC, jsut dont record on it. Hardware is so cheap, its not worth the hassle

Re:Do Not Want

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realize that the cable head end has a device that takes the OTA signal and puts in onto the cable system and then drops their own comercials into the feed just like the feeds provided by either fiber or SAT downlink. 99% percent of this is now down as a IP multicast within the headend of the Video Head Office.

Best case cable signal of OTA has been compressed twice...once by the broadcaster and once by the cable operator to put into into QUAM if they do not do drop and insert insert comercials on that channel. Typicaly it is reencoded another couple of times for things like emergecy broadcast system, encrypting the QUAM has zero effect on the quality of the picture, just the accessablity.

How much the system operator compesses the locals is up to them... typicaly at a former VZ headed we took a 50mbit/sec HD signal off the OTA reciver and compressed it down as far as 10 mbit/sec at the reciever for the must carry geting closer to god shit... and left it at 50-40mbit/sec for the stations that had HD sports. It gets interesting when the local HD PBS station gets the agrement with Big Ten for rebroadcast rights. The operator then plays the game of steeling from one channel to get the other watchable.

When I left the industry 2 years ago it was practical not to have a single SAT dish in the front yard if you could accept the bill for 2 10gig circuts you could get the entirty of US cable broadcast channels in a redundant way via a portchannel. Now the authorization to present this to the cable custormer is where the cost of cable really is.

Re:Do Not Want

[MightyYar]

I notice it when out at a bar or something. They have these huge, gorgeous flat panels and the room is dark so you can see the compression well. Football is particularly brutal - their live encoder can't handle grass well... it looks very over-compressed to anyone who has ever ripped DVDs and played with the compression settings. OTA signal is generally much better.

Re:Do Not Want

[JWW]

If my cable company starts encrypting my signal, I'm going to throw my HDHomerun tuner box through their fucking window!!!

Re:Do Not Want

[kenh]

FIrst off, SiliconDust has a couple very nice stand alone Cable TV tuners (I have the three tuner model), and yes, it requires a CableCARD, but my cable company hands them out for free (just like they hand out three free basic cable decoders for free, no monthly payment required - it's the law).

Second, remind me why these are called OTA channels? Isn't it becasue they are broadcast Over The Air? Buy a freakin antenna!

Re:Do Not Want

[Miamicanes]

> Simply use the net and get all the shows you want WHEN you want and with less commercials to boot.

Oh, really? And where, pray tell, is this magic IP-based virtual cable network that offers realtime IP feeds of the show that's literally running for the first time *right this second* -- as opposed to stuff that's either old (or at least non-realtime), low video quality, openly pirated, or some combination of the three?

There's no technological reason why CNN/MSNBC/Fox/TWC and the rest can't stream HD in realtime, and deliver encrypted copies of the shows you've already tagged for recording in advance & let you have the decryption key the moment the episode officially airs for the first time... but content providers just won't do it. And unfortunately, nothing can make them do it. Maybe the refusal of Dish and others to deal with AMC will prod them to do an end run around them and offer service directly to end users over the internet... but I doubt it.

As much as I'd like to believe that someday, someone will offer a boundary-free service over the internet that works like of like U-verse at the nuts & bolts level, but furnishes 19.2mbps content at original resolution in the native mode, and has a UI that's fully open & customizable by end users with programming backgrounds, I'm sufficiently nihilistic about the American content industry to know that when all is said and done, my monthly "TV-related" expenses would probably end up doubling compared to now anyway. Never, in the history of American TV, have prices genuinely gone down.

Competition from satellite HAS been nice, if only because it brought us Voom 5 years before Comcast even heard of HD, and brought us 200 HD channels on DirecTV when Comcast was still subjecting customers to "death of a thousand macroblocks" 10 new channels at a time, but don't kid yourself. One way or another, the industry is going to find ways to charge us a LOT more for a LITTLE more content, quality, and/or flexibility. And it'll probably compress the hell out of it, too.

Years ago, I laughed at my dad when he told me that color TV pictures were sharper in the 1960s than they were in the 80s and 90s. Then I saw my first DVD, and it sank in for the first time just how badly quality had been completely pwn3d by cost-cutting over the years. Now, the content providers are doing the same to us all over again. We have "HD", but the "HD" we have today via U-verse, Comcast, Dish, and even DirecTV is total and complete crap (minus 2 or 3 showcase channels) compared to the old days of Voom, where the SD channels had bitrates higher than U-verse uses NOW for its HD channels. MPEG-4 is good, but beyond a certain point, you can't fool mother nature. She's going to make sure you get blotches of red sparklies on areas that are supposed to be creamy white, just to remind you that someone is recompressing recompressed 12mbps video down to 6mbps. 10 years from now, we're going to be sold on "Super HD" with 3200x1800 resolution that, if we're lucky, will be indistinguishable from 60fps progressive 1920x1080 encoded at 25-40mbps, and basically just be oversampling with extra marketing and hype.

Re:Do Not Want

[MichaelJ]

It's not just the cable company. It's the production company, too. I have Verizon Fios, and on my TiVo, an hour of a 1080i AMC show like The Walking Dead is 3.25GB, while an hour of the ABC show Once Upon a Time is 5.86GB. It's very obvious, too, The Walking Dead looks blotchy, full of glitches and artifacts.

Re:Do Not Want

[swalve]

I didn't think cable companies were allowed to recompress the OTA signals? They just remultiplex the program streams into the QAM transport stream. Cable does have plenty of bandwidth though. I read a thing once where Comcast (I think it was) was designing their network to allow for a virtually unlimited number of channels by using on-demand streaming/multicasting. IE, the big channels are "on" all the time, but the channels in lesser demand aren't. So if nobody in a neighborhood is watching the Golf channel, its "slot" can be used for some other channel. By running fiber to the neighborhoods and carving them up into small enough groups, there is nothing they wouldn't theoretically be able to broadcast.

Re:Do Not Want

[amorsen]

You get 50Mbps from OTA, for one channel? How do you fit any channels in at all? Around here you wouldn't get 50Mbps from an entire MUX, never mind a single channel.

Anyway, if OTA is 50Mbps per channel, I can certainly see why cable is doing worse than that.

Re:Do Not Want

[elashish14]

who wants to bet said FCC people have coushy jobs lined up at some major cable company.

Pretty much. This is the same reason why I decided against building one for me parents.

In any case, this just gives me more reason to empathize with, even cheer for file-sharers. The system is so fucking corrupt. The content companies buy the policies they want, and the citizens ignore them. I guess you could say it evens out.

Re:Do Not Want

[amorsen]

Sports, particularly anything on grassy pitches involving balls, seems to be torture for most compression algorithms. They don't know that the ball is more important to render correctly than some random spectator, and they seem to get rather lost with the subtle detail of the grass.

Re:Do Not Want

[Jeremy Erwin]

My local PBS channel subdivides its OTA feed 4 ways:

26-1: 720p 7.5 Mbps
26-2: 480i 3 Mbps
26-3: 480i 2.5 Mbs
26-4: 480i 3 Mbps

It's pretty awful.

Re:Do Not Want

[Voyager529]

There really needs to be a futures market for government corruption.

The problem with that is that it's literally the most reliable investment in existence. The government would never allow such a thing to exist.

Re:Do Not Want

[BigDish]

My recorder is fine. I cut the cord long ago. But since the line is still active to me having a cable modem this solves the issue of getting a decent antenea in order to get the OTA's. Currently I can just plug my system / TV into the wall and still pickup those said channels as they are broadcast in clearQuam as required under current regulations.

This is exactly why they are doing this. What you are doing currently is considered theft of service.

Re:Do Not Want

[nabsltd]

In the US an ATSC multiplex is about 20megabit (19.2 I think). A QAM multiplex is 40megabit. Comcast squeezes 3 MPEG2 HD channels onto a single QAM multiplex. So yes, they do transcode the content.

Although cable companies often re-encode, the bitrate math in your example isn't proof, as even on the few frequencies with no sub-channels, it's rare that they use all the available bandwidth for that one channel. As an example, my local Fox station uses 12.2Mbps for their main stream, so that three streams like that would fit into one 40Mbps QAM "channel".

Also, re-encoding might not be a problem in some cases, as some TV stations feed the cable company from a point before their OTA encoder, so the cable company might get a 40Mbps (or more) stream to start with. I don't have cable, but do have DirecTV, and I know that at least one of their feeds for OTA channels in my area is this way, as the OTA only gives about 7Mbps to 720p, and you can see MPEG-2 artifacts like crazy, while the DirecTV feed is much cleaner, so it almost certainly comes from before the OTA encoder.

Re:Do Not Want

[nschubach]

According to the HDHomeRun site, they are cablecard boxes and says they need a digital cable service... is this a "suggested requirement" or am i missing something?

Re:Do Not Want

[nschubach]

Ugh, sorry, I should have checked out all the products. I see they have OTA boxes available.

Re:Do Not Want

[0100010001010011]

Why bother with a VPN? That of which we do not speak is $50 for 1TB. That's lasted me over an entire year of just my TV shows. I max out my home cable connection. I don't have to deal with seeding.

Just use Sickbeard and XBMC.

Re:Do Not Want

[eljasbo]

I know Comcast DVRs will give 30 second skips. you just need to reprogram the remote for a secret function. The 'A' button on the Comcast remotes works really well for this. http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-57404724-285/how-to-program-a-30-second-skip-button-for-comcast-dvrs/

Re:Do Not Want

[Anonymous Coward]

What is OTA? We have no broadcast here. As it stands you have to have a cable subscription to access the Public Access channel where the local public school announces everything. If you get up on the hills there is broadcast from 40 miles away when the local radio station isn't broadcasting acrossed the spectrum (due to a semi-permanent malfunctioning [insert-device-of-the-week-here]).

Re:Do Not Want

[toejam13]

The problem with a hoverman is that it is UHF only. Many DTV stations in North America still use the VHF-Hi band as well.

I use a dual-band Yagi antenna here at home. The UHF section is more directional (more elements) than the VHF section since the former suffers more from fade. The nice thing is that once you drop elements for the VHF-Lo band, the antenna gets much smaller, and by dropping support for UHF channels above 700MHz that are used for cellular, the UHF section is better tuned versus old Radio Shack antennas from the '50s - '80s.

Re:Do Not Want

[Alex Belits]

Any MythTV will automatically flag commercials and let the user either skip them automatically or do it in one button press regardless of the length of the break (useful when commercial detection produces false positive or negative once in a while). Oh, and skip lists in the stored recording can be edited, so everyone after you will see it with no commercials even if autodetection was wrong.

Re:Do Not Want

[Anonymous Coward]

But since the line is still active to me having a cable modem this solves the issue of getting a decent antenea in order to get the OTA's.

Not really. Not all coax jacks are the same. In order to prevent various issue with backfeeding noise into the cable plant, outlets which are installed for TV services have a little gizmo called a mitigation filter, which will interfere with the frequencies needed for the cable modem service. So either you have more outlets than you're paying for, or you installed your own splitter in violation of your service agreement. Or put another way, the only people who are currently able to get the OTA channels straight out of the coax outlet either have a digital box already or are doing something they aren't supposed to be doing. (Or the install tech half-assed the job, which is more often the case)

 

Now if they can also encrypt those channels over the same line even though they are free (as i don't need a subscription to get them)

But you already do need a subscription. In your case, you've subscribed to their cable internet and are gaming the system to get access to the OTA channels. If you don't subscribe, they don't even have to have the tap to your house connected. If you don't subscribe to any TV services, they can already legally install traps/filters to block the OTA re-broadcasts... it's just not usually worth the time/effort of doing so just to keep people from seeing a couple free channels.

All this change in rules does is remove a bunch of Legacy systems the cable company has to maintain. The vast majority of the population won't see any difference.

Re:Do Not Want

[DarwinSurvivor]

Which part of "required under current regulations" did you not read?

Re:Do Not Want

[Anonymous Coward]

You REALLY dont want to have users doing random computer actions on your recording device. Play blu-rays, netflix, etc is fine as long as its a specified action, but once you throw gaming into the mix, recording reliability falls right off the chart. Treating your recording device as a general purpose computer is just bad planning.

If your system's not SMP, or can't play games with one core isolated, you may have to burn a few bucks upgrading, but there's no reason not to do it on modern kit.

Reserve cpu/core #n (substitute n-m if you need more) for the DVR, and give it realtime IO scheduling:
1. Add the isolcpus=n kernel option at boot.
2. Launch your $DVR by taskset -c n ionice -c 1 $DVR.
4. ???
5. Profit.

Re:Do Not Want

[MrAngryForNoReason]

Sports, particularly anything on grassy pitches involving balls, seems to be torture for most compression algorithms. They don't know that the ball is more important to render correctly than some random spectator, and they seem to get rather lost with the subtle detail of the grass.

It is more the speed of movement that causes the problem with sports coverage. In a sport like football there will be multiple players all moving at once across the whole video stream. This makes it very difficult to compress because there are big changes from frame to frame. Compare this to something like a sitcom which normally has people standing and talking meaning very little changes from frame to frame enabling very efficient compression.

Re:Do Not Want

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a difference between being able to skip the ads and your DVR being able to skip ads; the difference is user intervention.

I've been using SageTV since 2004, and my media system will automatically scan shows as they're being recorded, and pick out ad breaks with extremely high accuracy. And even if it makes a mistake, one button on the remote, and I'm back to where I was in the show.

Hell, if I'm not paying attention, I usually won't even notice there WAS a commercial break.

Re:Do Not Want

[slashdot_commentator]

Have you taken a good look at how FIOS arranges its channels blocks? Fiber has so much bandwidth, they're broadcasting the same channel in SD, HD, and 1080i, simultaneously. (FIOS may charge extra to access the high end.) I seriously doubt the production company is compressing their signal; there's no advantage for them to do so. I suspect you're using a low-bandwidth channel to tape via TiVo. (In fact, I think that AMC only recently got a 1080i channel, here in the Northeast.)

Re:Do Not Want

[DarkOx]

Its not theft of service! First the CC is required under the current regulations to make those channels available in the clear to their customers. He *IS* a customer, he has a cable modem!

Now if he was not a customer or was somehow defeating the protection on the other channels that would be theft of service. What this is the FCC is allowing them to cut the services they offer to certain classes of customer, which he happens to fall into. His complaint is that he will be asked to pay the same rate for a smaller service offering now, if the CC takes advantage of the new regs. They probably will do that too since it will push more people to subscribe to an bundle that includes their pay TV offerings.

Re:Do Not Want

[Anonymous Coward]

Correlate the stock market with corporate campaign donations and voila!

Re:Do Not Want

[Bigbutt]

Seriously? I pay the cable company for my Internet access and they throw in Basic cable for free (which is, plug my TV into the wall and I get basic channels). Depending on where I lived would determine just which channels I'd get. Just a bit south of here, I would get some HD tv. Where I am now, I get all low def but I get the channels I want to watch (Local News and Big Bang Theory).

My ex picked up a cable box and HBO so she could watch True Blood (I think, or Breaking Bad or some other cable show). Now that she's gone, at the end of the 6 month trial, the cable box is going back and I'm going back to low def.

[John]

Re:Do Not Want

[macromorgan]

Don't forget the tiny hard drives. Time Warner's best DVR as of a few years ago only had 120GB of space. I bought a TiVo, and promptly dropped in a 2TB drive. I have multiple seasons of multiple shows on my DVR in HD, and it isn't even close to full. I love it.

Re:Do Not Want

[mcgrew]

Unless your TV is ten years old, it has an antenna input and a digital tuner built-in. Just get a rabbit ears if you're in or close to a city, otherwise put one on the roof. You don't need cable for OTA.

Re:Do Not Want

[jedidiah]

If it's OTA channels then you are just a pro corporate shill and completely full of shit.

At the BARE minimum, these MONOPOLIES should be on the hook for helping to ensure that OTA broadcast signals get to everyone they were originally intended for.

Re:Do Not Want

[danomac]

Well, in mythtv you can separate the recording backend from the frontend. For power usage reasons, I have everything that needs to be available 24/7 (recordings, files, tv tuners, etc.) are on a dedicated backend with a full raid setup and 4 tuner cards, which is always running.

The frontends are there only to connected to the backend for tuners, recordings, and files like music etc. Nothing wrong with using the frontends for gaming or other multiple purposes. The frontends are off unless actually in use.

I currently use one single backend with three frontends.

Re:Do Not Want

[jedidiah]

You've got to be joking.

Crap that the cable companies provide is why those HTPC solutions exist in the first place. This isn't about "geekiness". This is about having something that is not a total pile of crap. What you get from your local cable monopoly reflects the fact that they think they don't have to compete for your business.

With the "latest and greatest" from your local cable company, you would be lucky to have something as good as a Series 1 Tivo from back in the 90s.

My users would have a hard enough time going back to an actual Tivo. Never mind the crap that your cable company wants to give you.

Re:Do Not Want

[jedidiah]

> You REALLY dont want to have users doing random computer actions on your recording device.

Considering the fact that you are talking about a real PC and not some underpowered video appliance, your hysterics are really not that warranted. A real PC should have both the computing power and the scheduler sophistication to handle diverse workloads.

Although your notion of how a HTPC/PVR is put together is rediculously out of date. This is another advantage of the HTPC approach.

The display terminal doesn't need to be the recording device.

Your understanding of the technical requirements of a PVR are completely lacking.

Re:Do Not Want

[NateTech]

Who were they intended for? What's the coverage pattern of your local broadcaster's transmitter? Can they build more? Do they want to?

Been watching OTA HDTV with rabbit ears here for a long time. Works fine.

Re:Do Not Want

[spire3661]

First off, ive spent the last ten years building HTPCs. I have learned through long experience to treat my recording device like a SERVER, because thats what it is and thats the crux of my point. What you dont want is for your users to treat it like a workstation, doing any random PC task they like, possibly consuming all the machine's resources or needing a restart.

Re:Do Not Want

[Some Bitch]

> Simply use the net and get all the shows you want WHEN you want and with less commercials to boot.

Oh, really? And where, pray tell, is this magic IP-based virtual cable network that offers realtime IP feeds of the show that's literally running for the first time *right this second* -- as opposed to stuff that's either old (or at least non-realtime), low video quality, openly pirated, or some combination of the three?

BBC iPlayer. Ok, so it's only BBC channels but it's a start.

Re:Do Not Want

[Orion Blastar]

This one?

http://www.casano.com/projects/hoverman/index.html

I'll take a third option...

[edcalaban]

And cut the cord. The streaming services out there are good enough for me.

Re:I'll take a third option...

[Barlo_Mung_42]

Me too. Most stuff is streamed plus an HD antenna for the OTA channels. Works even better because the "OTA" basic Comcast isn't HD.

Re:I'll take a third option...

[2starr]

Works even better because the "OTA" basic Comcast isn't HD.

You need a CableCard, but you can get OTA channels in HD with basic Comcast service... although my understanding is there may be differences in some regions.

Re:I'll take a third option...

[Anonymous Coward]

And who owns the pipe your media streams through?

Oh right, Cable Companies

Re:I'll take a third option...

[Jeng]

My wife watches Fringe, that is the only program that anyone in my household watches that is on a channel that is broadcast OTA. Everything else is basic cable.

Re:I'll take a third option...

[Verteiron]

I do this, and I thoroughly enjoy it. It will end pretty soon, though, once the cable conglomerates get any semblance of network neutrality off the table. Then they'll just make up some excuse to block or throttle Netflix, Hulu, and the rest. In fact, they don't even have to get involved in the whole NN debate; the data caps they impose will soon make it financially unfeasible to continue streaming any service other than their own, which will be overpriced and offer a poorer selection.

Re:I'll take a third option...

[maeglin]

And who owns the pipe your media streams through?

Oh right, Cable Companies

I went out of my way to find a local independent* DSL ISP. DSL gets a bad rap because you need to be close to the pop for decent link speeds and sure, it doesn't come with "speedboost", but I'll take the constant 12Mbps I get over a capped link that only seems to hit advertised rates when using SpeedTest.net (and seems to slow down when my neighbors all pile on) any day.

* of course, it's only as independent as the next guy in the telco chain -- which happens to be AT&T. :(

Re:I'll take a third option...

[PCM2]

You need a CableCard, but you can get OTA channels in HD with basic Comcast service... although my understanding is there may be differences in some regions.

My local Comcast offers OTA channels in HD without a CableCard. I think what the OP was saying is that it's not "really" in HD, because Comcast's compression of the feeds sucks.

Re:I'll take a third option...

[Mike Buddha]

Where I live, I get the basic channels in both HD and SD feeds. I set my TV to ignore everything except the HD OTA channels, WGN (only in SD), and Discovery Channel(also only in SD).

Re:I'll take a third option...

[Anonymous Coward]

In the Seattle market, plugging a TV with an ATSC tuner directly into a wall, then scanning, gives us the OTA channels and then some unencrypted. This includes the HD channels. Here, despite the settop boxes not carrying UWTV2 in my sub-market area I guess, I can scan UWTV2 when plugged in directly. UWTV2 carries NASA TV sometimes. Rocket launches!

I strongly suggest we all call the FCC and complain.

One more reason to cut the cord.

[Anonymous Coward]

Do they not realize they're screwing themselves by doing this. How many people are going to at least go OTA. I did that a year ago and between OTA, netflix, internet etc. I haven't missed it at all. Besides most of the cable channels are crap.

Re:One more reason to cut the cord.

[Anonymous Coward]

Outside of nerds? Almost no one. The average person won't know or care.

Re:One more reason to cut the cord.

[Z00L00K]

Imagine the amount of time you will get on your hands if you don't watch TV at all. My TV hasn't been used for several weeks.

CableCard, to the rescue!

[jeffmeden]

Wait, 99% of TVs sold today don't bother supporting it... Shit!

Re:CableCard, to the rescue!

[Anonymous Coward]

Do any TVs sold today have a cablecard slot?

My bedroom TV has a cablecard slot and I love not having to juggle space for an ugly tuner box in the bedroom, but I got it in 2006 and I'd love to have a modern replacement waiting in the wings.

Re:CableCard, to the rescue!

[Anonymous Coward]

CableCard to the rescue? Google it: CCI

CableCard = DRM
I was hoping to build a MythTV box utilizing CableCard until I discovered that most (all?) of the "premium" channels would be blocked entirely from MythTV - and would have draconian restrictions on them even if I went with WMC.

Re:CableCard, to the rescue!

[Cramer]

Make that 100%. None, Zero, Nada. No TV on the market today has a cablecard slot. The CE manufacturers had enough of the bullshit continuous changing of the "standards" and crap cable companies bolted on outside the standards -- PPV, video on demand, iControl(tm), integrated guide data, switched digital video... Switched Digital Video (SDV) was the last straw. Without a Tuning Adapter, unidirectional cable devices (read: all 3rd party devices) are almost completely useless.

So ... why not use the OTA signal directly?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or you could just use an antenna to receive the free OTA channels directly without involving the cable company at all. You can get some pretty diminutive aerials these days for inside use if you can't mount one outside.

Re:So ... why not use the OTA signal directly?

[Andy Dodd]

There are many places in this country that the OTA signal is not reliable unless you have a massive antenna due to LOS issues.

Re:So ... why not use the OTA signal directly?

[h4rr4r]

Any good antennas you can suggest? Indoor or outdoor would be fine. I would prefer not to have to move it though. Multiple would also be better than having to move one.

Re:So ... why not use the OTA signal directly?

[Hatta]

Sorry, I've got a DTV antenna, live outside of the downtown area of the largest city in my state, and OTA TV still breaks up every time a car passes by. I watch SD analog cable even when I get the same channel in HD OTA, it's that bad.

Re:So ... why not use the OTA signal directly?

[Anonymous Coward]

Antennas Direct DB8 UHF Multi-Directional HDTV Antenna

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16882790012

Re:So ... why not use the OTA signal directly?

[h4rr4r]

Do you think this unit would be suitable to place in the attic?

I would prefer not to put it on the roof so there is less wife opposition.

Re:So ... why not use the OTA signal directly?

[Ichijo]

Here ($20) is a great one for indoor/outdoor use. I have mine mounted indoors on the pole of my TV stand.

It's is a clone of the Antennas Direct DB2. There's also a 2-panel DB4 and a 4-panel DB8.

Re:So ... why not use the OTA signal directly?

[Anonymous Coward]

For about two years I used a coat-hanger antenna, as described here:
http://makeprojects.com/Project/Digital+TV+Coat-Hanger+Antenna/722/1

Then, about 3 months ago I moved to a new house that got poorer reception, so I tried building a Single Bay Gray-Hoverman (SBGH) antenna. This antenna performed better than the coat-hanger antenna but is a bit larger.
http://www.diytvantennas.com/sbgh.html

Both antennas were placed in the top level of the house, indoors.

I've also added in a Channel Master CM-7778 preamplifier and now can pick up all of the channels in the area nice and strong.

Re:So ... why not use the OTA signal directly?

[CanHasDIY]

Any good antennas you can suggest? Indoor or outdoor would be fine. I would prefer not to have to move it though. Multiple would also be better than having to move one.

OK, truth time: I was trying to find some ridiculously massive, hopefully homemade mess of an antenna to post for kicks, when I came across this gem:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005US5M50?tag=wppk-20

Motorized, 360 degree rotation, multiple outputs, and comes with a remote?

Count me in!

Re:So ... why not use the OTA signal directly?

[cvtan]

Whoa! This antenna looks dangerous. From the Amazon description: "Small parts. Not for children under 3 yrs."

Re:So ... why not use the OTA signal directly?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think you understand what cable TV is really for. The term CATV originally stood for "Community Antenna Television", and was created for people who had difficulty getting OTA channels with an antenna. The idea is that the community would put up a single large antenna and then distribute the signal to the subscribers (those who paid to put up and maintain the antenna) via coax.

If you're one of the people that the cable television industry was created to support, there is no real way to receive free OTA channels without involving the cable company.

dom

Re:So ... why not use the OTA signal directly?

[CanHasDIY]

Any good antennas you can suggest? Indoor or outdoor would be fine. I would prefer not to have to move it though. Multiple would also be better than having to move one.

OK, truth time: I was trying to find some ridiculously massive, hopefully homemade mess of an antenna to post for kicks, when I came across this gem: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005US5M50?tag=wppk-20 Motorized, 360 degree rotation, multiple outputs, and comes with a remote? Count me in!

...aaaaaaand upon reading the reviews, never-fuckin-mind...

Man, what did we do for ensuring we were purchasing quality goods before peer review? Oh, right - we actually made quality shit ourselves.

Re:So ... why not use the OTA signal directly?

[spire3661]

Antennas Direct also sells them directly at http://www.antennasdirect.com/ Great customer service, too.

Re:So ... why not use the OTA signal directly?

[Anubis IV]

My folks still do this, and it's what we had the entire time I was growing up (personally, I rely on Netflix, Hulu, etc. these days exclusively). They work great most of the time and can save a load of money on a medium where no one with sense should be investing big bucks at this point. I was surprised how clear the reception was with the relatively small, indoor antenna my parents had directly above the TV last time I visited them.

Strangely, it seems that many people are unaware that it's even an option. My folks told me about a husband and wife in their early-to-mid 40s that came over for dinner awhile back. The wife made some comment about how she only watches the major U.S. networks yet cable TV is so expensive. When my parents pointed out that they get those channels for free with an antenna, the wife was dumbstruck. Apparently she started insisting that it was illegal to watch TV without a cable subscription. After several minutes of reassurances from both my parents and her husband that it was perfectly legal and had been around since television was introduced, she was left feeling a bit sheepish. Even more so after her husband pointed out that most of the homes she grew up in didn't even have access to cable TV since it wasn't in widespread use at the time.

Re:So ... why not use the OTA signal directly?

[spire3661]

I have this http://www.antennasdirect.com/store/ClearStream-C2-VHF-Combo.html in my second story attic at 47 miles out from the transmitters, roughly 50 feet above sea level. Mounted it to an attic cross beam, aimed it with my iphone compass and was good to go. Works like a champ.

Go here http://www.antennaweb.org/Address.aspx to evaluate how your location in relation to your local transmitters.

Re:So ... why not use the OTA signal directly?

[evilviper]

Any good antennas you can suggest? Indoor or outdoor would be fine. I would prefer not to have to move it though. Multiple would also be better than having to move one.

First you should go to http://tvfool.com/ and check your address for OTA digital signals.

Note the "Real" channel on the tvfool chart. If it's 7-13, you'd need a VHF-high antenna, if it's 14-51 a UHF antenna will pick it up. If it's 2-6, you're probably in Alaska, and sadly will need an old, full-range VHF-lo/hi antenna.

Any channels that are Green or Yellow will likely work with a simple, cheap, indoor antenna (preferably in your window, facing towards the transmitter). The simplest old indoor antennas seem to work the best... better than more expensive indoor antennas that are tunable or have a useless (for short cable runs) amplifier. Nice long "rabbit-ears" at a 45 degree angle will do a good job for VHF (real: 2-13) channels, while a nice big "loop" antenna will do very well picking up UHF channels.

If you're in the red, or worse, you MIGHT be lucky and receive the station(s) with an indoor antenna with minimal dropout, but at this point, you're probably at the point that you should invest in a roof-top antenna.

VHF is pretty simple, and easier to receive over longer ranges, and around obstacles like mountains, buildings or trees. For antennas, you have a couple choices which are both about equivalent in reception and price (about $40):

http://www.solidsignal.com/pview.asp?p=Y10-7-13&sku=716079000994">Antennacraft Y10-7-13 100mi 120" VHF-high
or
Winegard YA 1713 100mi 100" VHF-high

For UHF channels, reception is a bit tougher, as curvature of the earth, and any obstacles cause more issues. There's some debate over how the top 8-bay antennas should be ranked, but it's an easy choice when you see one of the contenders costs nearly half as much as the rest:

Winegard HD 8800 8-Bay 60mi UHF

Now, if you need both UHF and VHF-high antennas, connecting them with a splitter will cause you to lose a significant amount of signal strength. Instead, a purpose-built VHF/UHF splitter/combiner will perform much better. Just about any one will do, but here's a link for an in-stock $2 model:

Pico Macom UHF/VHF Band Separator/Combiner

And finally, if you're going to run the coax a non-trivial length, or if you are going to connect the antenna(s) to a splitter to serve multiple TVs or just multiple tuners (eg. TV+DVR) then you'll get a big benefit out of a mast-mounted pre-amp. The key is to get the lowest "noise" figure you can. There are a range of ridiculously expensive options that will get you a just-slightly lower-noise signal, but once again Winegard is much cheaper, and close enough:

Winegard AP-8700 VHF/UHF Pre Amplifier

Thanks to FCC regulations, you can put this all up on a mast as high as 12' above your roof line, without anyone being able to require you to get a permit or similar (unless you're in a historic area, or there's serious safety issues like overhead power lines). And if you happen to NEED to go higher to get reception of local stations, they MUST grant your permit request for minimal cost and in a timely fashion.

To deal with the risk of lighting starting fires or blowing up your TV, you need to ground your mast and the coax. A coax grounding block costs about $1, and like your mast, just needs to be wired to metal water pipes, or a grounding rod. Some more advanced coax surge suppressors exist, but I would never forego the simple task of grounding everything first.

That should be all the equipment you need, and the information on tvfool will tell you EXACTLY which d

Re:So ... why not use the OTA signal directly?

[girlintraining]

There are many places in this country that the OTA signal is not reliable unless you have a massive antenna due to LOS issues.

Funny... that old 1950s analog technology for beaming TV signals worked just great. No LOS issues, or anything else. But then, there was something about being able to make a ton of money selling off that bandwidth, then changing around all the protocols, technology, etc., so that consumers had to pay a fortune to get less and less... and now you can't even find something that can do what a VCR did in the 80s.

I suspect that lack of reliability is quite deliberate.

Re:So ... why not use the OTA signal directly?

[elashish14]

Well, they shouldn't even be using it anyways

Re:So ... why not use the OTA signal directly?

[nabsltd]

If you have metal siding, it makes an attic install trickier. It might still work, but you can't really know until you try, and despite the name, it is not a "multi-directional" antenna. Being a fairly standard quad bow-tie, it's likely to have a -3dB beam width around 10 degrees, and -12dB around 40 degrees or so.

What this means is that if all the stations you want are generally in the same direction, then it'll do a great job. But, if one transmitter is 90 degrees off from the direction it's pointed, your SOL for that one. It also has decent back-side rejection (because of the reflector screen), but if a transmitter is really powerful, you could still pull it in. This would be an option if you can point it at the weaker stations and have the stronger ones at the back.

Personally, I'm near the Washington, DC and Baltimore stations, and they are exactly 90 degrees off each other from my location. So, I have a 8-bay pointed at DC, and a 4-bay with a VHF-Hi specialty antenna pointed at Baltimore (because the 4-bay doesn't do a good job on those channels for the distance I am at). With this setup, I get 21 distinct frequencies, with an average of about 3 sub-channels per frequency.

Re:So ... why not use the OTA signal directly?

[Cramer]

The difference is... with an analog signal, it was still watchable even with significant noise and/or low signal. With digital, there's a cliff; you either have enough signal to construct the data stream, or you don't, and without a near perfect, continuous data stream, there's no f'ing picture at all. You don't get a wavy picture, or snow; you get a blank screen.

Re:So ... why not use the OTA signal directly?

[evilviper]

Man, what did we do for ensuring we were purchasing quality goods before peer review?

Well, in this case an understanding of the laws of physics would have taken care of it. Anybody claiming 150mi reception of TV signals is a bald-faced liar. The curvature of the earth, and the propagation of the frequencies involved simply makes that impossible in the general case. The standard numbers are 60mi for UHF and 100mi for VHF. It's along the same lines as all those 12v air compressors that claim to produce 250psi... twice what high-end shop compressors are able to produce. They're lying, and once they're lying to you, who knows how many other nasty things they're doing, like cutting corners on build quality.

But to answer your question, we did a few things... First, we shopped at stores we could trust. These days retailers will stock any PoS they think they can make money on, and take no responsibilty for the items they stock, but it doesn't have to be this way, and it wasn't the norm, even just 20 years ago. I personally avoid Walmart, because they intentionally stock inordinant amounts of crap, because they want to advertise a lower price, and don't care that they're screwing their own customers for the sake of a few cents price difference. My favorite retailer is Sears. While they're not perfect, they still have some traditional values and try to stock products that aren't complete junk, and they usually do so at about the same price as the junk dealers like Walmart and Home Depot. Kenmore appliances are nearly as cheap, and put the low-end brands at Home Depot and other to shame in a big way, but for some reason, people haven't wised-up.

Second, there were brands we could trust... It was only 10 years ago or so that well-known brands decided to cash-in their reputation and start selling complete crap. You can see this in cheap HP printers, Levi's, Sony branding on DVD Burners and other devices they don't make, and much, much more. The brands used-to mean something, and people were caught off-guard when things suddenly changed.

These days, I've adopted a dual strategy. I still believe paying more for a good product is eminently good strategy, but I no longer just trust that a given brand is selling high quality products.

Re:So ... why not use the OTA signal directly?

[StormUP]

So lets say I don't live in Alaska, but my Metro area still has a station on channel 5. What would you recommend? Is it feasible to use an all in one? Something like this? http://www.solidsignal.com/pview.asp?mc=03&p=HD8200U&d=Winegard-HD8200U-Heavy-Duty-Platinum-VHFUHFFM-HDTV-Antenna-(HD8200U)&c=TV%20Antennas&sku=&more=yes If so is there a particular model that research (which I haven't done) would indicate is best?

Re:So ... why not use the OTA signal directly?

[evilviper]

"So lets say I don't live in Alaska, but my Metro area still has a station on channel 5. What would you recommend?"

I can't answer that. You didn't say how strong of a signal it is, if you're trying to get other VHF stations, and if so, if it's in the same direction. The short answer is, if it's really strong, you can get away with an antenna not designed for it... If it's weak, you'll definitely need an antenna that does both VHF-lo and VHF-hi. But since we're only a few years past the digital cutover, it's still easy to find full-range VHF antennas.

One good choice might be: http://www.solidsignal.com/pview.asp?p=HD-5030&d=Winegard-HD-5030-Prostar-1000-VHF/FM-TV-Antenna-(HD-5030)&sku=615798398156

    "Is it feasible to use an all in one?"

It really depends on how strong of a signal you've got. I've recomended designing an antenna system around one of the best UHF antennas available, because UHF's shorter range makes reception much more challenging, and because the vast majority of channels are now on UHF. If you go with just about anything else, you'll be sacrificing UHF reception. UHF yagi/corner reflectors like that used in combo antennas are inherently poor performers after the digital transition, as they work best on highest frequencies, and those (52+) are no longer in-use. I've also never looked at combo units seriously because the price of seperate UHF VHF antennas is just as low, and you don't need to compromise... You can even do cool things like pointing the VHF and UHF antennas in different directions, which I've been able to do to good effect a couple times.

Re:So ... why not use the OTA signal directly?

[sunderland56]

You are correct that there are many physical locations with no good OTA signal. However, not many people live in those places.

The top 10 metropolitan areas include 30% of households; top 25, close to 50%. All have a rock solid OTA signal from multiple stations.

You've only got to drop down to a city the size of Grand Junction, Colorado - still a city with a decent OTA signal - to cover 99% of the population.

(Source: neilsen tv market data at http://www.tvb.org/media/file/TVB_Market_Profiles_Nielsen_Household_DMA_Ranks2.pdf)

Re:So ... why not use the OTA signal directly?

[Anonymous Coward]

I will gladly show how OTA is a total failure giving max 2 hours or so uptime at my residence. I'm not a homeowner, so cable is the only 24/7 uptime option at my apartment. Anyone from a major network, give me a call. Indoor antenna or outdoor dish on a freestanding mount are all that my lease allows.

Re:So ... why not use the OTA signal directly?

[Anonymous Coward]

What are these LOS issues you are talking of? Is it related to Pokemon?

Re:So ... why not use the OTA signal directly?

[evilviper]

Your lease agreement can't stop you from installing an (outdoor) antenna on property you are leasing. My last place was strict about that, too, but several of us had big antennas on our balconies, and the landlord has no ability to stop renters from doing so, per FCC rules which preempt all local laws, regulations, and rental contracts.

http://www.fcc.gov/guides/installing-consumer-owned-antennas-and-satellite-dishes

Now, if the property you're renting doesn't have any suitable locations to site an antenna, you're still out-of-luck, but not because of any terms in your lease agreement.

If you get hassled about it, print out the full FCC rule, and give it to them, with highlighted passages. Most people depend on the ignorance of those they rule over, and others may just be ignorant, themselves.

Re:So ... why not use the OTA signal directly?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, I've got a DTV antenna, live outside of the downtown area of the largest city in my state, and OTA TV still breaks up every time a car passes by. I watch SD analog cable even when I get the same channel in HD OTA, it's that bad.

In which case this rule won't affect you. Your cable company is running analog plant which means the only way of preventing you from seeing a channel is to use traps/filters like they do for channels like HBO and Showtime. The rules still require them to make the basic channels available with any TV service package.
The encryption is used by digital systems so that you can only have as many boxes hooked up as you're paying them for, but up until now you could still split the coax cable and get just the OTA channels on another TV if it had a digital cable tuner. What this rule does is allow them to encrypt all the channels, so you won't be able to have that extra TV with just the public broadcast channels... you'll have to get another digital box (or cablecard). It also will prevent people who have internet or phone but not TV from installing splitters and getting the OTA channels without a TV package subscription.

Re:So ... why not use the OTA signal directly?

[Anonymous Coward]

so that consumers had to pay a fortune to get less and less...

Let's see 3-5 B/W OTA channels in the 50s vs my 300+ DirectTV HD channels and I'm getting less, Where did you learn your math?

Re:So ... why not use the OTA signal directly?

[quetwo]

The problem lies in how OTA now works. A lot of people in major cities can't get the same channels they used to OTA. 8VSB has a nasty habit of suffering from the ghosting effect, effectively rendering the signal useless Ghosting == the signal bouncing off a building, and you get the same signal on the same frequency, just time-delayed. In NTSC this wasn't a problem -- it would just display it (and it was usually weak enough the end user had no idea it was going on), but in ATSC any bit of it causes an issue in the digital signal and causes the signal BER to go up beyond the point that the TV will display the signal. It is estimated that 30% of households in major markets get less than half of the the channels than they did before the switch to digital. I only get 3 stations when I used to get 9 before the switch (and I'm not in a major market -- I just live within 2 miles of some tall buildings where the signal is bouncing).

And that doesn't count the channel loss that everybody got when the stations were forced to UHF, which has a poorer penetration rate, and requires more power to go the same distance.

Re:So ... why not use the OTA signal directly?

[Anonymous Coward]

So how do you combine the signals from the two antennas?

Re:So ... why not use the OTA signal directly?

[Anonymous Coward]

For many this would work. And your right that people need to be reminded that over the air TV still exists

For me local channels on cable is basically a free add on to my internet access. And I can't get an antenna large enough in my apartment to get all the channels I get over clear qam.

on cable I currently get all (approx 8) local HD channels unencrypted. Over the antenna I can only get 4 at a time without repositioning the antenna.

Over the air is an inferior option for me and pretty much all suburban dwellers.

Re:So ... why not use the OTA signal directly?

[nabsltd]

The UHF and VHF pointed at Baltimore are combined with a UHF/VHF combiner (just like in this nicely detailed post) on the antenna mast. Then, the DC and Baltimore wires are combined near the tuners using a bi-directional splitter/combiner. I combine near the tuners because some of my devices have two separate antenna inputs, and those get fed the uncombined signal.

This sort of thing might not work if you have two antennas that both get some signal from the same transmitter, but it works well for me where the antennas get very little signal from the "other" direction.

Re:So ... why not use the OTA signal directly?

[StormUP]

Well thanks for the info. I think you've given me enough to work with. I think maybe I'll pick up a UHF antenna to start. During good weather I can get away with a cheapy small indoor antenna I'm borrowing. It does give troubles picking up the signal on a couple channels during especially adverse conditions.

An Antenna...

[John Bresnahan]

will also work for many people. I recently cut my cable TV service when I realized that almost everything I was actually watching was programming being broadcast over-the-air. A $50 antenna and I'm all set

Re:An Antenna...

[evilviper]

I couldn't agree more. A TV antenna gets me most of my content, and for the rest (a couple cable shows I watch) Hulu is free, and doesn't even use up a significant chunk of my internet bandwidth.

Re:An Antenna...

[Anonymous Coward]

An antenna doesn't work. Thanks to the instability of 8VSB, I went from OTA to cable and won't do OTA unless I move. I simply got tired of the macroblocks, the dropped frames, the audio dropouts, the frozen frames, and the blank screens telling me no signal. Cable all the way for me.

Re:An Antenna...

[Anonymous Coward]

The only OTA network I'm able to pick up via antenna is our local NBC. With the feed split from my cable modem to my TV's built-in digital tuner, I can get NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, and more. I only actually use it less than twice a week, but I will be pissed at Comcast when they take it away from me.

And this helps the consumer how?

[a-zarkon!]

Seriously, +1 Internets to the first person who can put a positive spin on this one. Wow. Just wow.

Re:And this helps the consumer how?

[turkeyfeathers]

Cable exec makes more money. Cable exec buys new car. Consumer gets to wash that car, earning cash to pay current month's cable bill. Win-win!

Re:And this helps the consumer how?

[TheNinjaroach]

It's the cable company's line, they should be allowed to do with it what they wish. Why should the cable companies be forced to deliver free services in any way?

Re:And this helps the consumer how?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone interested in joining me at the campfire tonight? We tell stories and sing songs and maybe do a little dancing. It's free.

Re:And this helps the consumer how?

[h4rr4r]

So when will I be getting that check for their line that crosses my property?

They can do what they like when they start paying their own way.

Also this is not a free service, merely a requirement that any OTA channels they carry for their subscribers be broadcast without encryption.

Re:And this helps the consumer how?

[ThatsMyNick]

JOBS. The cable and media companies are suffering innumerable loses due to piracy, of cable content. This is costing America innumerable number of jobs. Encryption alone will save tons of jobs, while affecting no legitimate cable watcher.

Re:And this helps the consumer how?

[Anonymous Coward]

That was the tradeoff for the right of way through both public and private lands. I have a Comcast line running through my yard that supplies the whole neighborhood. I can't legally remove it because of these regulations.

1. They get to use our land and airwaves.
2. We get limited 'free' services.

Scratch #2. Does that mean I get to dig up that line from my taxed property?

Re:And this helps the consumer how?

[Linsaran]

Seriously, +1 Internets to the first person who can put a positive spin on this one. Wow. Just wow.

By requiring all TVs to use one of our new Freedom Choice cable boxes we can provide a better over all customer experience, features such as our on screen channel guide can now be utilized on all your TVs. Think of it as an upgrade for your TV.

Sincerely,

Your friendly local cable company

Re:And this helps the consumer how?

[Aardpig]

Wish there was a "-1 Stupid Shilling for Corporate Moochers" mod. 'Cause you just earned it.

Re:And this helps the consumer how?

[h4rr4r]

Innumerable? I doubt it, we stole 0 from the muslims during the crusades.

What about all those legitimate cable watchers who don't want to rent a box?

Re:And this helps the consumer how?

[rasjani]

Check Boxee's twitter account & blog and you spot one atleast one person behind it thats happy about this ..

They even claimed that they had influence on fcc that ruling turned out like it did.

http://blog.boxee.tv/2012/10/14/boxee-welcomes-fcc-rulemaking-that-opens-door-for-innovation/

Re:And this helps the consumer how?

[sconeu]

Have you paid your license fees to ASCAP for those songs you will be singing?

Google for girl scouts happy birthday.

Re:And this helps the consumer how?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a parody of the cable executive's rationale, right? Because whatever losses they recover by getting rid of pirates will be offset by the people like me who are on the threshold of quitting the over-priced, poor-quality crap they sell on cable. Having to add a new, expensive box to the system will be the tipping point for me to say "No thanks. I'll just cancel it."

Re:And this helps the consumer how?

[sconeu]

Pardon me. Google for

girl scouts happy birthday copyright

Re:And this helps the consumer how?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know you are just trolling, but you'll find it doesn't cross "your land" to get to the whole neighborhood. It is more likely in the city street under the pavement. There may be a splitter / junction box along the city owned "parkway" between the street and the city owned sidewalk (this is how it is laid out in many areas; I am fully aware that it differs in some - for instance places with no sidewalk, no parkway, etc.). The part that goes on your land probably goes to your house. Although it may also head through "your land" to go to your direct neighbor's house too. Pull it out if you want; your neighbor may complain and then it will get routed over his land.

Now, the REAL question is how they can get a publicly granted right of way along with a publicly granted local monopoly without giving at least something in return. This was about the last of thing questionable things they could point to that they were "giving back". Now - nothing.

Re:And this helps the consumer how?

[Gothmolly]

Why does it have to help the consumer?

Re:And this helps the consumer how?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can get back to using an antenna and discover over-the-air TV. Yes, local carriers provide these channels...at their discretion. Bright House has a certain manner of pick-and-choose with those channels. Suppose you live half-way between two metro areas, Metro A and Metro B. Bright House might pick up ABC from Metro A, then CBS and NBC from Metro B. It will throw their subchannels somewhere like channel 836-2 and 899-5 where you might not bother to find it. As for HD, I'm still shacked to the HD box anyway for the non-free cable channels, and to get them on additional TVs means buying additional HD boxes. So I'm trying to figure out what has changed here. The period of getting all of my programming the same way whether using a set-top box or not, that died years ago along with analog TV. It really is 1985 all over again, but the audio is scrambled along with the picture this time.

Re:And this helps the consumer how?

[Anonymous Coward]

piratebay. and thus the consumers learn more about freedom and get the product they want without getting sodomized.

Re:And this helps the consumer how?

[circletimessquare]

this is trickle down theory

i mean as applied to the consumer in this scenario, not as applied to the act of washing a car

Re:And this helps the consumer how?

[CanHasDIY]

JOBS. The cable and media companies are suffering innumerable loses due to piracy, of cable content. This is costing America innumerable number of jobs. Encryption alone will save tons of jobs, while affecting no legitimate cable watcher.

Yea, that excuse will work on the (sadly, large) percentage of the population who don't think any further than what the sound bites they base their political philosophies on require... I think that particular demographic is most oft referred to as the "voting public."

Those of us capable of cogent reasoning will explain, likely for naught, that encrypted OTA == no more truck rolls for connect/disconnect orders == less jobs total, as the now-useless techs who used to install your service are given pink slips.

Re:And this helps the consumer how?

[Anonymous Coward]

that line resides on public property..

Re:And this helps the consumer how?

[ThatsMyNick]

Somebody cared to mod this as troll and flamebait. Wow, I did manage to convince some people that I was serious, despite responding to a comment that calls for parodies. Kudos to myself I guess.

Re:And this helps the consumer how?

[gman003]

I think you're either vastly over-estimating the value of a carwash, or vastly under-estimating the monthly cable bill.

Re:And this helps the consumer how?

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, that's brilliant. Reaganomics in a nutshell. Multiply by a whole country over 30 years and you get the mess we're in.

Re:And this helps the consumer how?

[Anonymous Coward]

Positive spin: You can stop watching so much TV and do something with your life.

Re:And this helps the consumer how?

[circletimessquare]

give all the money to the rich people and they'll hire us to wash their car

you can get angry, laugh, or, like me, weep at the fact so many morons actually swallowed this crap, as they lose their job

Re:And this helps the consumer how?

[AK Marc]

Nope. My land has a buried power line, cable TV, and water. I could walk to the edge of my property line, back up about 2 feet, dig straight down, and a relatively large neighborhood will lose power, water and cable. I'm not sure where the telephone lines are laid, but I know for sure where those three are because of sewer works recently that had them spray-paint my lawn to show the location of utilities to make sure nothing was broken.

Re:And this helps the consumer how?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, +1 Internets to the first person who can put a positive spin on this one. Wow. Just wow.

Alright I'll give it a go, as I work for a cable company and can offer some insight here.
First of all, if you pay for any TV package we are already required to supply those channels at no additional cost to the consumer.
Now, if your cable provider still runs an analog service, this actually won't really affect you. The only thing they encrypt on analog are the premium channels like HBO, and we're NOT going to invest any money into doing anything like that just to block the public channels.

The people this does affect are people who have a provider who is running digital-only plant. (Many are running a dual plant, both analog and digital, and for those people it won't affect you until they turn off the analog). Just as with analog, if you buy any TV package your provider has to include those channels- this isn't changing.
But right now, you can split your coax and install another TV... if it has a digital cable tuner (most do not) which can read the clearQAM you will be able to see JUST those public channels... all the rest are encrypted so you'll need an actual cablecard or cable box.
The other situation is when you have the internet or phone service, but not TV. The tap is still hot, the cable TV signal is always present, so you can split your coax and get just those public channels on a TV even though you aren't paying for the TV service. They are NOT currently required to allow this- they could, for example, install frequency filters which block everything except the phone and internet ranges. But they don't, because it would mean a lot of added cost for something which really isn't that much of an issue.

So unless you're installing extra taps, and/or trying to leech some TV when you don't pay for it, it won't affect you. So here's the positive "spin" the parent was wanting to see:
Many of the local problems people experience with their cable service are a direct result of someone splitting their coax and not doing it properly. For example, upstream of any TV-ready outlet is a little device called a mitigation filter. This prevents non-cable TV frequencies from being able to transmit upstream into the cable plant, in particular the frequencies used for the internet and phone services. (This is why much of the time moving a cable modem to an outlet originally installed for TV services won't work) A lot of equipment can generate noise which if allowed to leak upstream, will cause some pretty nasty issue for those other types of services... and not just for you, for everybody on the same node... in some cases everybody on the same CMTS. So if Joe Handy three houses down split his coax upstream of the mitigation filter and adds on another TV, he might actually be the reason your internet speeds just took a dump and your connection starts dropping in and out. This happens a LOT more than people realize- I know, I deal with it on a daily basis. It's one of the hardest problems to isolate and repair, it's not usually consistent and can go on for weeks or months if the technician can't catch it while it's happening.

So how will this rule help? Well, in digital-only systems people won't be able to just screw around on their own and get services. They'll have to get another digital box (or cable card) to add another TV. Which means less noise on the plant, less trouble for other subscribers, and lower operating costs as a result of fewer service calls. Not that subscribers will really see any savings, those budget allocations will just get spent on other things like routine system upgrades.

So there you have it, just the facts. Sorry I couldn't really give you much "spin", as that's not my area of skill, I just fix technical stuff. But hopefully you know a little bit more and will understand that the only people who will be negatively impacted are those who are already "gaming" the old system. (Not that I care, but if you're leeching a service don't cry about it when things change)

Re:And this helps the consumer how?

[zippthorne]

If the city owns the sidewalk, why do you get fined if you don't shovel it?

Re:And this helps the consumer how?

[Anonymous Coward]

Poe's law and all that.

Re:And this helps the consumer how?

[Cyfun]

The positive spin is that it will drive more and more people to ditch their cable companies and either stream over ze Intarwebs or just invest in rabbit ears. Television providers such as satellite and cable with packaged channels are soon going to be obsolete, and I for one can't wait!

Install costs going down.

[Anonymous Coward]

While this sucks for HTPC's, they don't tell the main advantage of this, Install costs "should" shrink (or Cable profits will be padded more). Because everything is encrypted, turning on/off cable for a household is as simple as a Authorization Database entry. No more truck rolls, cables are always live and just need an authorized box to get cable.

Re:Install costs going down.

[ZeroSumHappiness]

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Bring down prices! Hilarious!

No, seriously, hahahahahaha.

My guess

[geoffrobinson]

Having worked at Comcast previously, my guess is their main motivation is to save bandwidth and being able to digitize every single channel. (Analog channels take up more bandwidth.)

Re:My guess

[Andy Dodd]

Except they already digitize these channels - they just must preserve them "in the clear" without encrypting them.

Re:My guess

[Githaron]

You can encode without encrypting.

Re:My guess

[h4rr4r]

You can digitize without encrypting. That is what clear QAM is for.

What this is really about is that they won't have to roll a truck for a cable install. Heck, they can fire all the techs too, or at least most of them. They will leave all the cables live all the time and make you come get a box to do the decryption. When you leave you give the box back, or if you don't pay they deauthorize it on their end.

Re:My guess

[Anonymous Coward]

Analog vs digital has nothing to do with encryption. you can make the signal digital without encrypting so my GUESS is that it has nothing to do with saving bandwidth. It has to do with locking in the customer.

Re:My guess

[Lunix Nutcase]

They already do digitize all the channels and they already over compress them as is.

Re:My guess

[Lumpy]

Digitize for Clear QAM takes no more bandwidth than Encrypted QAM. Most areas have not had analog at all for 2 years now.

I used to work for Comcast in the headends and OTN locations, I know more about this than the CSR's or installers ever hope to know.

Re:My guess

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes analog channels take up more bandwidth but this isn't what this is about.

They already have digitized the OTA channels - via in the clear QAM. What this does is allow them to encrypt them such that a QAM tuner is worthless and you will HAVE to rent a box or cable card.

Re:My guess

[Lumpy]

Most comcast locations already fired all the techs. They use independent contractors. Most of the guys did dish installs, Direct TV installs and Comcast installs all in the same day.

Re:My guess

[h4rr4r]

Well now those guys will only be doing dish and direct.

Re:My guess

[Tr3vin]

It is already digital (QAM). That is not what this about. They are now going to encrypt those digital broadcasts.

Re:My guess

[Ghostworks]

That was my first thought as well. With the increase in On-Demand content, they're already running pretty low. (Ever come home and find a "this channel is temporarily unavailable" message?) It's also a good reason to start phasing out non-HD boxes (provided your provider doesn't still charge more for an HD box). Eventually getting rid of the low-res channels and carrying only the HD channels would free up a little more bandwidth.

Re:My guess

[SuricouRaven]

I suspect that the legal definitions of encode and encrypt might differ from those used in technology. Even ignoring that in technology encode can have many meanings, of which encrypt is just one.

Cable TV, for example, generally uses crappy video encoding technique and works around this by simply using a really high bitrate. For practical reasons - it's easier to just accept the higher bandwidth need than deal with the very complex business of non-realtime encoding, which involves coordinated extensively with the channel owners.

Re:My guess

[Anonymous Coward]

So they digitize them, they have every right to encrypt them. /thread

Re:My guess

[Anonymous Coward]

What this is really about is that they won't have to roll a truck for a cable install.

They already don't have to roll a truck for a cable install in most neighborhoods.

No, what this is *really* about is that they won't have to roll a truck for cable de-install. But I bet they come up with a new excuse why you have to pay more for internet+TV than internet-TV since the old excuse that once you got internet they couldn't cost-effectively block you from getting TV will no longer be true.

Re:My guess

[wbr1]

Not just ClearQAM, ATSC is unencrypted digital, often with better quality (No reencoding, higher res, etc). Buy an antenna.

Re:My guess

[jittles]

Well My understanding is that all they do is set the privacy bit on the channel and your TV won't display it, even if it can decode it. Is this not true?

Re:My guess

[Anonymous Coward]

Time Warner won't give you a box to just hook up, even if the cable is already live. Time Warner requires a truck roll. Period.

Re:My guess

[snspdaarf]

Come home and find it? Right now, it happens all the time, in the middle of shows.

Re:My guess

[oh-dark-thirty]

They can already do de-installs remotely in my area with addressable switchable filters. I cut the cord a couple months ago, (keeping the internet of course), and there was a slight delay of a week or so before they terminated the signal...nobody had to come out, it was all done from the CO.

Re:My guess

[afidel]

No, it's not true. All the privacy bit will do is tell a compliant recording device that it can't record (or can record for local playback only, or can record for a single local playback, there's more than one bit).

Re:My guess

[geoffrobinson]

While I was there, there were just starting to investigate switching channels dynamically. I wonder if that's what that's about.

Equipment fees

[Albanach]

So, after two years they can charge an equipment fee. If you have three televisions,each with a decoder and a $5/monthly fee, the cable company starts taking in $180/year in extra revenue from the lowest paying customers.

Still Waiting

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll get cable when they make good on their original promise: Pay for TV, so no ads. Part (most) of the money you pay goes to the show to replace their ad income.

For all you young-lings, TV used to be completely free. To get people to pay for cable, their sales pitch was that you wouldn't get any ads.

They can pry my torrents from my cold dead heads or stop being lying, greedy assholes. Their choice.

Re:Still Waiting

[Anonymous Coward]

You're watching content they paid to produce without paying them, and they're the greedy assholes?

Re:Still Waiting

[Anonymous Coward]

Amen to that!

Re:Still Waiting

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd mod you up if I could.

I trade my time on this earth for money to pay them to waste my time with their bullshit channels and ads? Screw that. TV, in its current form, is a pox upon society. Decay.

Cable companies racing for irrelevance

[claytongulick]

You'd think that in today's era of streaming video, netflix, hulu, amazon and iTunes, the cable companies would be doing everything in their power to increase viewership numbers (for advertising revenue).

Adding obstacles to folks trying to watch their programming seems insane - like they are actively trying to go out of business, driving more folks (like me) away from traditional add supported media. My wife and I do all our watching on Netflix (or Amazon, if there's a show we're willing to buy). I can't imagine going back to the bad old days of television ads.

Not that I mind, given the advances in cell technology, I think we're less than 10 years away from cable companies being nothing more than legacy internet providers anyway, like dial-up.

Comcast = Earthlink in ten years.

Re:Cable companies racing for irrelevance

[Anonymous Coward]

Do the cable companies get any advertising revenue for the OTA channels?

Re:Cable companies racing for irrelevance

[twmcneil]

That's a nasty thing to say about Earthlink.

Re:Cable companies racing for irrelevance

[lightknight]

Nonsense. Cable companies are facing an end, though I doubt that it will take ten years before the peak of their power has been hit.

They are using copper...fiber right up until the last mile, then copper. They are resorting to every legal tactic in the book to lock in content providers, who oddly enough, come across as the better guys in this scenario. And this would be fine, if it weren't for the baby that Ma Bell gave birth to -> Verizon and its FiOS service. Since it's pushing fiber to the home, the game ends with it, unless scientists come up with some new technology that tops fiber.

Cable companies are very aware of how effortless FiOS provides high-speeds and eats away at their customers. They know they have limited time before their monopolies, natural or otherwise, are over.

Re:Cable companies racing for irrelevance

[bill_mcgonigle]

Meanwhile, Verizon has halted most FiOS buildouts, is trying to get out of more, and is requiring copper removal where they're doing it because the install costs are so high. Hybrid fiber/coax with DOCCIS 3 will push 300Mbps and is cheaper to install and maintain. Cable isn't afrid of FTTH.

Re:Cable companies racing for irrelevance

[Anonymous Coward]

They are trying to kill those services. Remember the data caps that keep getting threatened for broadband? If they become reality you can say goodbye to streaming video in any decent quantity.

Re:Cable companies racing for irrelevance

[ThatsMyNick]

Cable companies dont get ad revenue for any channels. They only get the fees the subscriber pay to receive these channels.

Re:Cable companies racing for irrelevance

[roc97007]

> You'd think that in today's era of streaming video, netflix, hulu, amazon and iTunes, the cable companies would be doing everything in their power to increase viewership numbers (for advertising revenue).

You'd think. I believe the real problem is that Comcast, et al can only envision one business model, and are reacting to cable tv doing the buggy-whip thing by holding tighter onto what they still have, not having the capability to understand that what they have isn't important anymore.

You're absolutely right; the cable TV companies are acting precisely like the dial-up services did when broadband became widespread -- try desperately to make their old business model work. (I actually knew someone who connected to earthlink over his new broadband connection because he didn't know any better.) The ones who continue flogging that dead equine will go out of business; the ones who move on may not.

In my area, Comcast is openly bad-mouthing their terrestrial competitor, (a salescreature comes to our door approx once a month to try to get us to give up fiber), trying to push cable TV at "introductory" prices, and advertising peak internet speeds way beyond what any consumer needs, still thinking that internet access is a raw numbers game. Having been a Comcast customer in the past, (I was handed to them by AT&T when they quit the cable modem business) I can't wait for them to go out of business. Worst customer service in the industry. Worse even than the old TCI Cable.

Re:Cable companies racing for irrelevance

[Anonymous Coward]

Cable companies aren't going anywhere. Cable companies along with telcoms provide almost all the broadband, so you will need them to get internet. No other players provide that service, it is a monopoly. And before someone starts with "Google will provide..." they are only in Kansas City and will likely not expand beyond it.

Re:Cable companies racing for irrelevance

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh boy! I'm gonna go get FIOS today!

Wait. They don't service my state nor are they likely to in my lifetime. Fuck. FIOS is great if you live in New England or Silicon Valley. For the vast majority of the US it is not an option.

Re:Cable companies racing for irrelevance

[eth1]

You'd think that in today's era of streaming video, netflix, hulu, amazon and iTunes, the cable companies would be doing everything in their power to increase viewership numbers (for advertising revenue).

I'm sure they ARE doing everything in their power to make those things illegal, expensive, or inconvenient.

Fuck

[Anonymous Coward]

This move will only make pirating television more appealing.

Thanks for nothing, FCC. I'm tired of every last fucking thing on Earth being monetized for no reason other than greed, and the so-called "regulators" doing nothing as the are getting huge sums of money from the parties behind the changes.

Re:Fuck

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not greed. Get used to the fact that if someone makes it or maintains it, you must pay for it.

Free is a myth. Piracy is theft.

Re:Fuck

[Anonymous Coward]

That's completely fine with me. If we encrypt our torrenting and get a little more clever about it, the cable companies have exactly nothing more to offer. And I really mean nothing.

Re:Fuck

[oh-dark-thirty]

Pay for it, sure....through the nose, not so much. Cable bills are increasing at a rate far higher than inflation (yes we can blame the content providers to some degree), the cablecos do not offer consumer-friendly packages beyond the tantalizing "intro deals", their DVR's are pure crap, their customer service is fair at best, and they offer a poor value.

Piracy: The Better Choice(tm)

[David Gerard]

That is all.

Re:Piracy: The Better Choice(tm)

[Anonymous Coward]

That is all.

Free loading only works when a small percentage of people do it. At some point content producers will stop producing content *or* more likely content delivery groups will only deliver to devices that have an encrypted pipeline from medium (cable, dsl, ota, etc.) to tv screen. Perhaps what is occurring is a step towards the later in response to too much piracy.

And to the I just need to find a torrent crowd. The internet provider for most folks is a cable/dsl/etc based content provider. They will simply block sites. If the sites are not somewhat persistent most people won't be able to find them.

Re:Piracy: The Better Choice(tm)

[Anonymous Coward]

Piracy: It just works(tm)

It seems most have missed the other part of this

[Anaerin]

The way this was agreed was if the cable company is encrypting their channels, they have to make them available unencrypted over IP, so devices like Boxee and others can still receive them, or work with PVR makers to make "Software updates" available so they can decrypt the streams.

Given that the daddy of all open-source PVR projects, MythTV, already supports IPTV systems (after a little careful setup), this is actually a good thing. And while it is basic channels only for now, hopefully the practise will expand into premium channels later on.

Is it worth it for them?

[gauauu]

Well, it'll be interesting to see if Comcast does this in my area. I'm not going to buy/rent a cable box. If they encrypt my channels, and thus make it so I can't watch their cable with my setup, then I'm dropping my service (both the $7 basic cable, and the $55 internet). Over the air and DSL will be good enough.

I guess I should write them a letter. As if anyone would read it or care.

Re:Is it worth it for them?

[roc97007]

Ew, you're doing business with Comcast? I'm sorry.

Dish, Direct, Antenna, or cut the cord

[WindBourne]

All are better options then the cable companies.
We switched from Comcast for TV and net, and now use qwest (centrury link) for FASTER internet, and dish for TV. However, once my kids get older, I want to kill even dish. In the meantime, we will never go back to comcast. Just a plain evil company.

Re:Dish, Direct, Antenna, or cut the cord

[SuricouRaven]

Dish, direct, antenna... you forgot torrent.

Re:Dish, Direct, Antenna, or cut the cord

[prestonmichaelh]

If your kids are young, then cut it now. A few Rokus and a Netflix streaming subscription and you are set. I have a 4 year old and if needed, she can work Netflix on the Roku herself. Doesn't mind watching the same seasons/episodes of Dora, Fresh Beat Band, Franklin, Barney, etc. over and over and over. I find most kids to be like that.

People like to complain a lot about Netflix content (or lack there of), but they actually have quite a bit of kids content.

Re:Dish, Direct, Antenna, or cut the cord

[roc97007]

Roger that. My daughter prefers Roku to cable. Netflix is less than $10 a month. She's even watching (gasp!) documentaries!

Re:Dish, Direct, Antenna, or cut the cord

[Anonymous Coward]

Torrent is dishonest and therefore theft. Hard to believe open source folks defend the GPL and yet advocate piracy. May the FBI knick down your door and confiscate your torrent downloading equipment.

THERE GOES CABLE!

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Look! TV just killed itself!

I have two tween kids. They don't know what Cable, satellite or OTA are...

There's YouTube, NetFlix, Amazon and PutLocker.

They also know some suckers who pay for HuluPlus, to watch the unwatchable.

Re:THERE GOES CABLE!

[dunng808]

That describes my two sons, both in their twenties. Also, I find it ironic to pay for ad supported OTA content when so often the ads are for my cable company. All I really need to be happy are HBO and TCM. Well, no, Comedy Channel for Daily Show and Colbert Report.

Re:THERE GOES CABLE!

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Tourette's (noun, medical) Definition:

No one gives a shit what you think. Not one shit.

So keep living like a hermit bum, fucking fuck.

Re:THERE GOES CABLE!

[Datamonstar]

You can watch Daily Show and Colbert Report for free online.

Re:THERE GOES CABLE!

[Anonymous Coward]

so your children are retarded then?

Re:THERE GOES CABLE!

[Talderas]

TV broadcasting has 10 years to unfuck itself. That's when their NFL contract expires.

Re:THERE GOES CABLE!

[Anonymous Coward]

My tweens and teen know what OTA channels there are but that's it for live TV. The only issue we have is occasionally hitting the number of netflix streams.
I would be willing to go satellite or cable if they were reasonable on cost and not force me into a bundle with 100+ channels that I don't want and would never watch.
(e.g. I pick X number of specific channels, they quote me a price for only those channels, I pay that amount monthly and only get the channels I want.)

Re:THERE GOES CABLE!

[AlphaWolf_HK]

Sickbeard does a much better job than all of those. Does for me anyways.

Dissolving reality into a base solution.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I suppose I could engage in the inevitable, this evil, that evil, but I'd rather address the issues any solution will have to deal with. One lack of any kind of global program guide with IMDB level detail. Lack of any vetting of content for quality. Output devices that hide the various disparate nuts and bolts that result from too many standards and not enough consensus. Reasonable price for something that's suppose to be for the masses.

OTA

[digitalaudiorock]

I know it's not an option for some, but I live where I can get New York OTA channels, and even Philly stations if I want, with my roof antenna and rotor. I record everything we watch on a MythTV system with a TB of disk space. I haven't had pay TV in 25 years.

I have cable for internet only. Every time the cable company calls me trying to sell me a TV package, I tell them exactly what I'm currently using, and exactly why I want no part of their any-consumer bull shit. I wish more people would do the same thing.

What sucks of course is that, because all the available internet providers are TV providers, you pay a premium for internet when it's not part of some fucking package. The whole situation just blows to put it mildly...and the fucking FCC, whose supposed to be working for us, can go straight to fucking hell too.

Re:OTA

[mrmeval]

Who can stand watching cable? With the shit slide ups, constant animated ads at the bottom of the screen, animated popups, animated popups covering the critical moment of a show AND blaring out distorted audio, time stretching so much the show is shaking like a crack baby sucking his stoned mama's tit. Yea that means you syfylus channel.

I'm just fine with a 5 year delay in watching a series on DVD or other means. I'd bet tempted to pay if I could watch the show clean in real time but they won't offer it except on most DVDs.

Re:OTA

[Pulzar]

I'd bet tempted to pay if I could watch the show clean in real time but they won't offer it except on most DVDs.

You can pay to watch many shows per-episode in close to real-time... Amazon, Google, and Apple all offer it, and there are probably others, too.

Compared to Netflix, it's expensive. But, compared to cable subscription, it's still quite cheap.

Re:OTA

[Anonymous Coward]

And by the time the dvds come out you can figure out if it just got canceled before it even had a chance to get good (Surface, Journeyman to just name 2 I'm ticked off about still).

Re:OTA

[Alien Being]

Yep. FCC went too fucking far this time.

I'm putting a big fucking antenna right on the roof of my condo, laws and bylaws be damned. Anyone who tries to take it down is in for a fight.

Re:OTA

[swb]

I always wonder about that.

If you watch 8 episodes of current TV via iTunes per week you're talking $24 per week, which is $96, about what I pay for whatever digital-plus-without-premium package my wife signed us up for,

If saving money was the goal, you'd probably be better off to limiting yourself to 2-3 episodes of current TV and beefing up a Netflix subscription to 4 discs at a time.

Re:OTA

[Anonymous Coward]

Every time the cable company calls me trying to sell me a TV package, I tell them exactly what I'm currently using, and exactly why I want no part of their any-consumer bull shit. I wish more people would do the same thing.

They don't give a shit, you're wasting your breath. The people who get paid to do outbound sales aren't conducting feedback surveys, unless you "stay on the line to take this important satisfaction survey". Save yourself the effort- just say "I'm not interested, please remove me from your calling list. ThankyouGoodBye" and hang up.

What sucks of course is that, because all the available internet providers are TV providers, you pay a premium for internet when it's not part of some fucking package

Well duh. They have a certain fixed overhead cost of maintaining the cable plant out to your house, regardless of whether or not you're getting TV services. Since that cost is also already figured into the costs of the TV-only services, if they didn't give you that "cut rate on internet" it would mean they're nailing you twice for the base operating costs.

Re:OTA

[zippthorne]

If you had a HAM license, the bylaws might be subordinate to other regulations allowing antennas.

Re:OTA

[Anonymous Coward]

Well the FCC has your back with this plan. They allow you to erect any antenna necessary on your property or property you have exclusive use of to receive OTA overriding any local laws or HOA rules that say otherwise.

If you think about, perhaps with this move, the FCC is really trying to reintroduce people to the richness of the forgotten OTA.

No difference...

[Anonymous Coward]

I suppose I should be mad (as a cable modem subscriber who refuses to pay for cable tv, I am one of the few people who can actually recieve OTA channels via cable without (technically speaking) paying the TV company for any *TV* service or box rental). In the past, I have had my TV plugged into the cable to recive the free digital feed of the OTA channels.

However, I haven't used this in a while. To be honest, there is no advantage to doing so. I built myself a $10 antenna (google "2 by 4 DIY antenna") that gets them all over the air. In fact, I can even get a few OTA channels that the cable company wouldn't give me, because I'm not technically in the broadcast area, although the large city 20 miles away is. Additionally, while the video feed certainly came through unencrypted, all the broadcast info was scrubbed, so I couldn't look up show listings or anything else, and the channel numbers were being fed through some random channels that were in no way affiliated with the broadcast signal.

Two points

[rickb928]

1. When I was buying my first flat-panel TV, I went into a 'high-end' retailer (no, not Best Buy) and wanted to see the picture on one of the midrange sets. After realizing there was no OTA cable atached, the salesperson admitted they couldn't show me a picture. I found a paper clip, stuck in the jack, and got 3 channels. OTA is not always to hard to get.

2. MY cable box now is an SA Explorer 3xxxHD something. It has, for a tuner, you guessed it. A CableCard. Next tiem I hear Cox jerming someone around for getting their CC working, I'll send them the spec. Cox knows CableCards, they USE it.

So I guess I am getting satellite after all. And OTA. Almost everything we want to record is OTA anyways.

Re:Two points

[Anonymous Coward]

I just wait for DVD. Then bargain bin or used.

I refuse to give them more money to stick it to me. As is TW 'raised' their prices by jacking up the rental cost of the modem. 5 bucks a month for something like that? Seriously? Least I have the option to opt out for now...

Re:Two points

[Digicrat]

That reminds me of once when I had a cheap antenna that only let me receive a handful of channels. One day I was cleaning up and forgot to reconnect the antenna, leading to the realization that the unconnected wire was just as effective as the antenna was! Suffice it to say, the next day I bought a new RS Flying Saucer antenna which worked well ... until I moved, and now need something better.

I have Comcast Internet, and typically I'm able to get half the broadcast channels via QAM, and the other half via OTA. Between them, I'm able to pick up most of the local stations ... and somehow there is little overlap between the two. If this change goes through, that will just add incentive for me to get a better antenna.

Glad I live in an area with good reception

[archer, the]

90%+ from a DB4 in the attic. I wonder how much my cable bill will shrink when I switch to just data and voice?

Oh, right. It won't shrink at all, will it.

Re:Glad I live in an area with good reception

[h4rr4r]

If you have a cell, drop the voice.

It should shrink quite a bit though. I used to have cable and internet then I went just internet and it saved me about $30 a month.

Re:Glad I live in an area with good reception

[Anonymous Coward]

90%+ from a DB4 in the attic. I wonder how much my cable bill will shrink when I switch to just data and voice?

Oh, right. It won't shrink at all, will it.

You got that right. You will loose you bundle discount making each of the remaining services more expensive.. The only really question is will the bill for the 2 services equal or exceed the bill for the 3 bundled services.

Re:Glad I live in an area with good reception

[Anonymous Coward]

I have set up many MANY people with VOIP in the last couple years. For the overwhelming majority of people in urban USA there is no reason for anything but a good Internet connection. Even if one wants to stay 100% legal.

coat hanger antenna is the best bang for your buck

[j2.718ff]

Build your own with coat hangers.
eg: http://www.repeater-builder.com/antenna/pdf/make-digital-tv-coat-hanger-antenna.pdf

Re:It seems most have missed the other part of thi

[tapspace]

Making money off the elderly and out of touch, the way God intended.

WHOA...watch out for UHF only!

[digitalaudiorock]

These so-called "HDTV" antennas were sold for years with the incorrect assumption that digital TV would stay on UHF and it most assuredly did not!

In the New York area for example, several of the UHF digital networks moved their digital signal to their original VHF frequency when the switch over occurred.

Don't buy one of those unless you're sure that all the digital networks in your area are on UHF. If any are, you'll need a combination UHF/VHF antenna.

Re:WHOA...watch out for UHF only!

[eth1]

Not to mention that many of those "HDTV" antennas are like buying Monster cables.

My cheap ($20) Radio Shack UHF/VHF antenna in the attic pulls in every channel around here from over 40 miles away. (granted, in my area all the transmitters are within 2 degrees of each other at that range, so directional antennas don't have to compromise)

Re:It seems most have missed the other part of thi

[hardtofindanick]

Last I checked broadband internet was not free.

This is actually a bad thing.

comcast is loaded old MPEG 2 only hardware

[Joe_Dragon]

Comcast is loaded old MPEG 2 only hardware and lots of old HD boxes that even have HDMI out at best the old ones have DVI out.

Directv is talking about going all MEPG 4 by 2015.

make it like canada where you can buy the box

[Joe_Dragon]

make it like canada where you can buy the box (with out cable card / mirroring / outlet fees) and some systems even have rent to own.

Re:make it like canada where you can buy the box

[j2.718ff]

I still find the idea of needing a box highly annoying. It's one thing to need a box because your circa 1980 TV can't decode a digital signal. (Added bonus, you can now change channels with a remote control!) It's quite another when your TV is full of computing power, and can even download new applications over the internet. I don't want to have to deal with a pile of remote controls just to watch a simple TV program.

I don't think that the commenters here understand

[Anonymous Coward]

Reading the comments here, it appears that people are confusing digital with encryption. Right now free OTA signals from the cable companies are being broadcast in a digital form unencrypted. I get 8 free OTA HD digital channels in Vancouver with a homemade cloths hanger antenna. As a bonus there IS a channel guide (each individual channels sends its own programming info). What is proposed/allowed here is the cable companies can now encrypt the free OTA digital signal. An you will need a box to decrypt it. Basically no more free OTA! Unless this encryption will be included in future TV's and work across all Cable companies.

On the other hand. Maybe it is I who does not understand.

except TWC's guide is wrong far too much

[dltaylor]

I realize that it is probably intentional on their part, like stripping the time signature (downstream-only NTP-alike) from the local PBS station, but Time Warner Cable's guide is wrong consistently. I cannot program my DVR reliably, nor, even make viewing choices based on the guide. I just have to manually scan the channels to see if there's anything on I want to watch.

More work than it's worth, often.

Re:except TWC's guide is wrong far too much

[snspdaarf]

Suddenlink is the same way. Almost every day their system is off by an hour, until about noon, then it syncs up. Of course, a number of the channels only show "DTV" as the show being carried, so it's only a slight improvement. I would go OTA, but even when TV was still analog, the area I am in had very poor reception.

Re:except TWC's guide is wrong far too much

[Anonymous Coward]

I use an antenna. Digital over the air TV has a few nice 'extras' that analogue TV never had. 1) The picture is 1/2 as sharp as Blu-Ray. Over the air is 1080i, blu-ray is 1080p. Its crazy more sharp than watching a DVD. 2) No static or noise. 3) Electronic Program Guide. Yes, you read that correctly. Over the air antenna TV has an electronic program guide with date and time. Now where I live, the guide has been 'up and down' for two channels, and although the specification says that they can provide up to 100 hours of 'whats coming' information, most channels don't provide more than 12 hours of 'guide'. Still, you can get a birds eye view of 'everything at one go', and without flipping see what's what. Besides showing just the program, it also provides details about the program.

Re:except TWC's guide is wrong far too much

[afidel]

If you want reliable guide data you can pay Schedules Direct $25/year for an XML feed that you can use with whatever program you want. It's how I get guide data for my media portal based HTPC.

Re:coat hanger antenna is the best bang for your b

[Anonymous Coward]

I built one of these as a cheap test using scrap wood for the "post," cardboard covered with aluminum foil and coat hangers. It worked quite well. I went on later to build an antenna that looks like Eagle Aspen Dtv2Buhf Directv 2-Bay Uhf Antenna reference earlier, except mine has 4 bow-ties. I found plans somewhere on the internet. It also works quite well, is more durable and performs slightly better.

I am tempted to build a version that is more like the Antennas Direct DB8 Extreme Range Multi-Directional 'Bowtie' UHF DTV Antenna, also referenced above (4-panel db8).

Why? Well, just because.

Re:It seems most have missed the other part of thi

[spire3661]

WE should get the IP streaming without being forced to agree they can DMCA lock signals that are being broadcast over the air for free. WE own the right of way these companies operate under, we should be demanding more from infrastructure, not less.

avsforum had a good essay on this

[GodfatherofSoul]

The service providers are slowing building in an end-to-end encrypted system for content so you'll have zero unrented access to media. HDMI is part of the solution; eventually cable boxes will stop providing analog outputs.

Cable companies? You don't want business???

[erroneus]

You certainly know how to put the message across don't you? People these days are downloading their content with Netflix and stuff like that. They don't care to put a ridiculous box inline with their home theaters complicating things. Your model is broken and unwanted.

Meanwhile, as cable companies are losing business, they are offering free TV is many areas so that they can sell more ads to advertisers. (Yes, we have a large collection of eyeballs to sell... see? We give it to them TV for free!) No one is offering me free TV just yet, but I don't care... I don't watch TV.

Sports and political talk

[tepples]

There's YouTube, NetFlix, Amazon and PutLocker.

Do these services have live sports or political talk shows? In my survey sample, one head of household, would rather go back to dial-up than drop ESPN and NBCSN (formerly Versus), and the other would be lost without MSNBC.

Re:Sports and political talk

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Do these services have live sports or political talk shows? In my survey sample, one head of household, would rather go back to dial-up than drop ESPN and NBCSN (formerly Versus), and the other would be lost without MSNBC.

I'm pretty sure all of the news channels like MSNBC have 24-hour streaming video, but I haven't watched them so I don't know if they are identical to their catv feeds or different.

As for sports, I've heard rumblings about streaming subscriptions in limited cases. I haven't paid attention beyond headlines because I personally think professional sports are a circus, as in bread and circuses. I kind of like the idea of them not being available streaming or ala carte, it's like a tax on stupid.

Re:Sports and political talk

[Synerg1y]

In the real world yes... I'd be conflicted to say the least... but THIS IS SLASHDOT!

Re:Sports and political talk

[EdIII]

These are kids he was talking about. Political talk shows are out.

As for sports, that is the only real thing holding back a lot of guys I know from switching.

That being said, Cable Companies keep raising the costs year after year above and beyond what people are receiving in cost-of-living raises . ESPN, especially. They can go fuck themselves.

Young people are cutting the cords faster than ever, and in the case of kids, never accepting the cord in the first place. That's why the Cable Companies will die.

1) No incentive to younger people to shell out $50-$60 per month (base rate). It's hard enough for younger people to find money in the first place, let alone spend it on stupid shit. It's basically a cell phone plan, or Internet plan in terms of cost. What does it deliver that is as attractive, or more attractive, to younger people than Amazon, Netflix, YouTube, Hulu or pirating ?

2) Pricing themselves so high that older people are increasingly looking to save costs by switching to something else. Guys that need to have sports are really just buying it for sports then. That's not an audience that will keep revenue streams at the levels they are now, which means sports would need to increase their revenue streams even more.

Re:Sports and political talk

[Charliemopps]

You've been taught to watch this stuff. You may not realize it, but it's a fact. ESPN being the most glaring example. Because media companies continue to refuse to accept the new world they live in, the gap is being filled by others. They are going to be replaced, and it's their own fault. Their ratings will continue to slide into oblivion while they blame it all on piracy. Meanwhile my wife drops $16/month on some MMO I've never heard of. Imagine if CBS could get $16/month from all of their viewers... oh wait, they could, if they didn't have their heads so far up their asses.

Re:Sports and political talk

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

If I want lies, I just come to Slashdot. :-/

Re:Sports and political talk

[jd2112]

Or perhaps they know their days are numbered and they are milking their cash cow for every drop while they still can.

Re:Sports and political talk

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

For my kids? Sports is about PLAYING. They can't watch their favorite sport for more than 10 mins.

Re:Sports and political talk

[eharvill]

http://www.thefirstrow.eu/ will take care of your sports needs.

Re:Sports and political talk

[Anonymous Coward]

"Young people are cutting the cords faster than ever, and in the case of kids, never accepting the cord in the first place. That's why the Cable Companies will die."

Have you any evidence for this? I don't know about the breakdown of age groups but the MVPD (granted that includes satellite and FIOS and UVERSE but Dish and DirecTV should be subject to the same market sentiment you speak of) sector had subscriber growth in both 2010 and 2011.

I see remarks that center on the premise that you don't need subscription tv when you have all those other services you mentioned, but I've never seen any data other than the single anecdotal point provided by the poster that is usually something like "we ditched cable years ago for netflix and torrents. If I want to watch sports I go to the bar".

Re:Sports and political talk

[maugle]

The ONLY reason I got into watching (American) football was because my MythTV setup allowed me to skip the commercials. Without commercials and delays, football is exciting. With commercials, plus the tedious announcers and the multitude of delays between every down, the game just drags on way too long.

ESPN should be frightened, because I doubt this is limited to a single sport: It's simply not worth watching a sport on TV anymore without the ability to skip the commercials and the boring bits.

Re:Sports and political talk

[SeaFox]

These are kids he was talking about. Political talk shows are out.

As for sports, that is the only real thing holding back a lot of guys I know from switching.

That being said, Cable Companies keep raising the costs year after year above and beyond what people are receiving in cost-of-living raises . ESPN, especially. They can go fuck themselves.

I would agree with this but it's not the cable companies that are the problem -- it's the employers. You can replace the phrase "cable companies" with any number of other groups, "grocery store chains" and "oil companies" being the first that come to mind. The real issue is the "cost-of-living raises" people are getting (don't know who this is btw, I haven't gotten a raise in over four years) aren't meeting the actual increase in said costs. It's supposed to be a reactionary adjustment to compensation. The result is everyone is actually taking pay cuts but the employers can still say "we're paying you just as much/more than we were last year."

As long as people don't collectively stop putting up with it, it will continue.

Re:Sports and political talk

[Tastecicles]

I'm pretty sure the Olympics was streamed...

Re:Sports and political talk

[shiftless]

Do you not realize what's going on? The businesses are being squeezed by the government! If you only knew how many certifications, and mandatory courses, and paperwork, and bullshit, and red tape that the simplest business has to deal with, it would blow your mind. Stop blaming business, and start blaming the GOVERNMENT, who are the source of 90% of America's problems today.

Re:Sports and political talk

[theCoder]

You could only stream the Olympics (in the U.S.) if you had cable (they required a log in). Even if you could watch it OTA, you couldn't stream it.

Re:Sports and political talk

[DarkOx]

Lost without MSNBC? Seriously they are about as reputable as Fox News.

Re:Sports and political talk

[cdrudge]

Do these services have live sports or political talk shows?

No. But AtdheNet.TV does (at least for the former). It's not exactly HD quality, but it's usually more than watchable at least for football that's not on CBS/ABC/NBC/FOX or out of market games.

Re:Sports and political talk

[iamgnat]

BS

Unless said company is a government contractor (in which case yes they do have lots of requirements, but that is more of an issue of the entrenched companies like Northrop and Lockheed lobbying for such restrictions to raise the bar of entry and protect their turf) there are no certifications or red tape you have to have to start or run your business. You have to file you incorporation paperwork (LLCs are even easier and cheaper) and pay your taxes. And if your head count is below a certain size you skate under a bunch of personel related regulations.

Certainly there are a bunch of laws/regulations that you need to be aware of, but there are a bunch of laws/regulations you are supposed to be aware of just to be an average citizen (that most have no idea about).

I'm not saying there aren't a bunch of things the government could do better in regards to businesses of all sizes (though by your comment I think we'd drastically disagree on what those points are), but blaming the "high" gas and food prices on the government is just stupid. It's actually because of the government subsidies and tax breaks for "farmers" and the oil companies that stuff is as cheap as it is here (look at the costs in the rest of the world where such handouts aren't in place). Yes part of Europe's higher gas prices is due to their taxing of it, but (arguments about the funds being properly used aside since that's a universal problem) that's really where your road use taxes should come from. That idea sends the average American into a tizzy and a half though...

Re:Sports and political talk

[iamgnat]

Imagine if CBS could get $16/month from all of their viewers... oh wait, they could, if they didn't have their heads so far up their asses.

Actually they probably couldn't due to simple economics. Most people don't watch just one channel anymore. Even if they only watched 5 non-premium (ESPN, HBO, etc..) channels, a $16 subscription for each puts it up in the realm of the cable subscription where you get far more options even if you don't use them all. It gets even worse when you throw in the premium channels (because if an OTA channel could get $16 ESPN would charge $30 or more). For the premium channel shows I watch throughout the year, if I subscribed to all of them that are available on iTunes I'd spend 2/3rds of my cable bill. I still wouldn't have access to all of those shows, would have to pay more for the back catalog (if I came into something after a season or two which is more difficult when you don't have channels to surf when you are bored) where they are typically rerun at no additional cost on cable, and it doesn't include all the other non-premium shows I or my wife watch that would run that total well past the cost of what our cable bill will be for quite sometime (taking yearly increases into account).

Really I just need to get off my ass and stop watching so much TV. That's the real solution to the problem with the system. We've (collectively) lost interest in what is outside our doors unless it is brought to us through the TV and even then we're more interested in the fantasy rather than the real.

Re:Sports and political talk

[Miamicanes]

> Young people are cutting the cords faster than ever

The only "cord" young people have decisively cut are landline telephones, mostly because it's now an expensive service of minimal value compared to mobile phones. Some "young people" who don't view computers as important might try to use their wireless phones for internet access, but for most "cord cutters", it has more to do with avoidance of installation fees and stiff ETFs that would otherwise accompany frequent moves than any genuine desire to cut a metaphorical cord.

Also, let's not forget that "young people" who don't live with their parents or in a college dorm commonly share a house or apartment with at least one other housemate, which cuts the effective cost of the cable and internet bill in half. I don't know a male under 25 with a housemate who doesn't automatically subscribe to the most expensive channel package available, just because they can. Most young adults don't really *care* about monthly service costs until they get their own house or apartment, at which point the staggering cost of buying those services for one person becomes vividly apparent.

As far as cable companies dying, you're forgetting something -- even if content providers like ESPN and MTV were available over the internet directly to consumers, it's not cost-effective for them to individually bill millions of credit cards for each channel. Past a certain point, the transaction fees end up being more than the profit margin. So, we'll always have companies that will go out and negotiate bundle prices with multiple content providers in exchange for a monthly fee that's a fraction of what they'd cost individually. The catch is, it's a slippery slope for everyone involved, and there's tremendous motivation to increase "ARPU" by any means necessary... increasing channels from 2 to 3 (showing the same content, but repeating it more often), bundling 10 more channels for an extra 10 cents, whatever. It's no different than going to BK, and spending almost as much to buy a small hamburger, fries, and drink as you'd have spent on a large Whopper combo.

At the end of the day, under just about any likely scenario, somebody who tries to subscribe to exactly one high-value cable channel they care about (like ESPN, MTV, CNN, or Bravo) will probably end up paying $25. Two channels? $40. Three channels? $62. Twenty channels? $75. And so on, until you're right back to spending $120/month for the half-dozen or so channels you passionately care about, another 20 or so that you might watch once in a blue moon, and 6,000 you don't care about, but had to buy to get 3 of the other 20.

Re:Sports and political talk

[cayenne8]

I personally think professional sports are a circus

Not so much pro sports...but college stuff, much more exciting.

Re:Sports and political talk

[mcgrew]

If you only knew how many certifications, and mandatory courses, and paperwork, and bullshit, and red tape that the simplest business has to deal with, it would blow your mind.

If businesses weren't so sociopathic that they don't care how many people they kill* or how much pollution they generate** (before the EPA, rivers actually caught fire), if they were honest and upstanding, we wouldn't need regulation. But the sad fact is that most corporations and a few small businesses are run by sociopaths who don't care how many people's lives they ruin.

As for certifications and mandatory courses, well, I certainly don't want an unlicensed doctor operating on me, I don't want unlicensed truckers hauling stuff on roads I drive, and I want those damned giant trucks and busses inspected. I want people building and repairing stuff to actually know WTF they're doing.

* The investigantion showed that the dozen men were killed because the company ignored the regulations

** Before the EPA the air around a Monsanto plant was so bad it would burn your lungs. Drive past one in the summer in 95 degree weather and your windows were up despite there being no AC.

Re:Sports and political talk

[jedidiah]

If cable companies can't compete in a tight economy then it's THEIR problem. It's not your bosses problem. It's not Exxon's problem. This kind of thinking is exactly what is going to KILL their little cash cow.

Sooner or later people will drop them in favor of things that aren't entertainment products with highly elastic demand.

Physical monopolies are powerful but it's ultimately a luxury item.

Re:Sports and political talk

[jedidiah]

Joe? Joe the Plumber? Is that you?

Stop repeating someone else's election year rhetoric as if you actually have some sort of clue or meaningful real world experience.

Re:Sports and political talk

[shiftless]

Unless said company is a government contractor (in which case yes they do have lots of requirements, but that is more of an issue of the entrenched companies like Northrop and Lockheed lobbying for such restrictions to raise the bar of entry and protect their turf) there are no certifications or red tape you have to have to start or run your business.

Ever tried to be a tattoo artist? Or a hairstylist?

Re:Sports and political talk

[shiftless]

As for certifications and mandatory courses, well, I certainly don't want an unlicensed doctor operating on me, I don't want unlicensed truckers hauling stuff on roads I drive, and I want those damned giant trucks and busses [usatoday.com] inspected. I want people building and repairing stuff to actually know WTF they're doing.

So how does licensing accomplish that?

Re:Sports and political talk

[shiftless]

Basically, you're a moron

Re:Sports and political talk

[jedidiah]

> Ever tried to be a tattoo artist?

Ever heard of Hepatitis?

Re:Sports and political talk

[Jerry Rivers]

I bought a $5/month VPN and streamed every single event I wanted to see directly from the
BBC Olympics site. Fuck NBC and fuck cable.

Re:Sports and political talk

[Anonymous Coward]

You want political talk shows? Just watch the Keiser Report on Russia Today.

Re:Sports and political talk

[bjdevil66]

...and the other would be lost without MSNBC.

Or maybe they would rediscover objective thought?

I'm not saying that CNN News or the networks are models of objectivity either, but MSNBC (or most of Fox News) programming are embarrassingly slanted. They're our modern Tokyo Rose or Pravda, which we snicker at in retrospect.

Re:Sports and political talk

[Lord Byron II]

Umm.. I'm a small business owner in the USA and my only interaction with the federal government is taxes at the end of the year, which takes me a couple of hours to do.

What kinds of business are you referring to? Are you talking about media companies specifically? What kinds of "mandatory courses", and "certifications" are necessary to be a cable company?

Re:Sports and political talk

[tepples]

At least Morning Joe Brewed by Starbucks has a paleoconservative on its panel. Does Fox and Friends have a liberal?

Re:Sports and political talk

[mattack2]

1) No incentive to younger people to shell out $50-$60 per month (base rate). It's hard enough for younger people to find money in the first place, let alone spend it on stupid shit. It's basically a cell phone plan, or Internet plan in terms of cost. What does it deliver that is as attractive, or more attractive, to younger people than Amazon, Netflix, YouTube, Hulu or pirating ?

Current shows *without commercials* (if you use a DVR). I'm (mostly) ignoring the pirating part.

Re:Sports and political talk

[mattack2]

And so on, until you're right back to spending $120/month for the half-dozen or so channels you passionately care about, another 20 or so that you might watch once in a blue moon, and 6,000 you don't care about, but had to buy to get 3 of the other 20.

I think your prices are purposefully exaggerated. I wish we were at least given the choice to buy individual channels. Give me the actual prices it would cost to pay for each channel from my end.. I could even imagine it being sort of a hybrid between perfect a la carte and what we have now. For example, minimum $20 or whatever per month, which includes OTA rebroadcasts + X channels out of basic/expanded basic lineup. For everything else (including more basic/expanded basic or premium), there's a specific price you have to pay.

Even if packages continued on, having both means would let people make the specific choice for them.

I would pay JUST AS MUCH AS I AM NOW for the channels I care about. That would make the cable company MORE money since they wouldn't have to pay licensing fees for the channels I don't want. (They would also lose a little bit from things, like home shopping, that pay the cable companies.) This would, however, give specific feedback to the cable companies about what channels I actually care about.

(BTW, yes, you *could* extrapolate that to PPV for individual shows. *IF* the price were low enough, I could do that too. However, the PPV prices through existing means are ridiculous, so things like Netflix all you can eat streaming for older content are more reasonable, IMHO. I'm only a netflix DVD customer currently, though.)

Re:Sports and political talk

[EdIII]

DVRs do not solve the problem of commercials.

It's so bad right now with overlays that most OTA and broadcast programming is downright fucking unwatchable to most people. The web download content however is mercifully bereft of overlay advertisement, as well as the commercials.

I have a hard time seeing where the advertising away from Cable Companies is 1/10th as bad.

Re:Sports and political talk

[mattack2]

The overlays have existed for well over a decade. (Some say 9/11 started the crawl on news channels, but at least channel bugs were around before that.)

DVRs let me 30 second skip over commercials. (I actually don't mind most "product placement", even though it bugs some people as much as regular commercials bug me.)

Re:Sports and political talk

[SeaFox]

If cable companies can't compete in a tight economy then it's THEIR problem. It's not your bosses problem. It's not Exxon's problem.

Well it sort of is your boss's problem. People accept employment at a rate of pay because that rate of pay is enough to cover their cost of living expenses with extra left for recreation (and savings for retirement). Cost-of-living raises are meant to be an adjustment to your compensation to account for inflation. Without adjustments like this employees will eventually find that the rate of pay they are receiving is less than they can agree to do the work for, because the pay has less buying power than it did when they originally took the job. The employment position will becomes underpaid and not retain/attract quality employees without keeping pace with the market value of the work (which is partially dictated by cost-of-living expenses in the area).

Now cable TV is a luxury really, I agree with that. But the OP already framed it as a necessity by relating it to what people are getting for cost-of-living increases. My point is simply that it's not the cost-of-living that is supposed to adjust to meet the raises. The COL changes as the markets see fit. The raises are supposed to be a response to them. To say otherwise is the tail wagging the dog.

And I disagree on the mention on Exxon. Gas for a vehicle is a necessity of life, simply because it isn't possible for everyone to get jobs within close proximity of their homes. Public transportation infrastructure is not advanced enough in most areas to do without a car of your own because we've spent the last 50 years building our cities on the idea there would be cheap gas forever. No gas = no work = no paycheck for everything else.

Re:Sports and political talk

[SeaFox]

Do you not realize what's going on? The businesses are being squeezed by the government! If you only knew how many certifications, and mandatory courses, and paperwork, and bullshit, and red tape that the simplest business has to deal with, it would blow your mind. Stop blaming business, and start blaming the GOVERNMENT, who are the source of 90% of America's problems today.

If this is true, with the business-friendly Bush administration getting two-terms in office, rolling back environmental and regulatory protections on business, the load should have decreased significantly -- leaving free capital to compensate hard-working Americans.

Nope, that didn't happen.

Cuts both ways, don't it?

Re:Sports and political talk

[SeaFox]

What kinds of business are you referring to? Are you talking about media companies specifically? What kinds of "mandatory courses", and "certifications" are necessary to be a cable company?

Ironically he replied to someone who's worked for cable companies, and if they really had to take mandatory courses or get any real certifications (on the management level) I can say with some authority that your cable TV service would be magnitudes better and more affordable. On the inside, it really is a big money grab.

Re:Sports and political talk

[Anonymous Coward]

$50-60? In my area try over $100.

BTW, for me it wasn't sports, it was Kari whats her name on Mythbusters. I finally realized I have a limited amount of time to spend watching TV. There is enough free stuff out there, people passing around DVDs, the public library, that I have a backlog.

Screw sports, fake political shows, and even Mythbusters. It's all in your head.

Re:Sports and political talk

[shiftless]

Yeah, I got vaccinated for that. So explain to me how I can get hepatitis from a hairstylist? And how does forcing a tattoo artist to sit and watch hours and hours of films just to get a stupid ass certificate actually do anything to prevent hepatitis infections, vs simply lining someone's pockets?

Re:Sports and political talk

[shiftless]

You have to have a license to be a *HAIRSTYLIST* in this country. What makes you think cable companies operate with no regulations, no paperwork, and no red tape?

Re:Sports and political talk

[shiftless]

What in the world are you even talking about? If you've got some kind of point to make, feel free anytime.

Re:Sports and political talk

[mcgrew]

You can't get a license unless you can show that you're competent at the task. If you flunk your CDL you don't drive a big rig legally.

A licence is indication of competence.

Re:Sports and political talk

[SeaFox]

How amusing. I was thinking the same thing.

I'm only making a point that COL pay increases are supposed to follow the trend in inflation, so that people can continue to meet their costs-of-living with their current jobs, and you reply with some stupid neo-con rant about how it's because the poor little business owners are being picked on by big-bad government. But you completely ignore that business owners had one of their own running the show for almost a decade, and didn't treat their employees any different despite their reprieve.

Re:Sports and political talk

[EdIII]

Overlays are not product placements.

Unless Picard stops for a moment, looks at the viewer, and says, "When I battle Romulans, I like to do so with confidence. Blah Blah Blah anti-perspirant is for me", I don't really care. People drink Coke and Pepsi in real life. It's not distracting for me to see an actor drink a Pepsi, especially when you are not really doing anything that brings your attention to it. Obvious exceptions being crushing it on your head, or sticking it into some girl (that's porn though).

You seemed to be making that point that a DVR coupled with a Cable subscription offered commercial free content, whereas the online offerings I mentioned did not.

That's not entirely true, and overlays are far, far, far, worse than any commercial break could have ever been. In fact, I am willing to bet that overlays would fetch more money if they were ever used to advertise anything other than upcoming shows and other bullshit.

Re:Sports and political talk

[EdIII]

I was not framing Cable TV as a necessity as much as I was framing entertainment as one. It really is. Without some form of release, or ability to deal with the stress, it has immediate and long term effects on your health.

When I mention COL, I am putting it into the context of your entire entertainment budget. That is what Cable Companies don't seem to understand. There is only so much money that an American family can spend per month for entertainment and raising your costs beyond COL, simply to justify the insane and insatiable need for endless corporate growth, is just plain stupid.

It has only worked so far because of how many people have used lines of credit to obscure the fact they don't make enough money to support their lifestyles . A lot of people have had some painful realizations in the last 4 years because of that.

For any company to continually raise the prices of their products and services beyond what somebody is capable of paying as percentage of their income is a level of stupidity relegated to entertainment itself, like The Three Stooges.

That was my point. I realized a long time ago that I did not want to spend, or could I afford to spend, more than $100 per month on a Cable subscription, as a percentage of my monthly income. To get now, what I was getting then, would be even more.

I think that some people value their entertainment through television a heck of a lot more than I do. Obviously, they are willing to pay more. That being said, I just don't see how it possible to continue on with the yearly increases, without being subsidized by lines of credit. That game has a nasty ending to it.

Re:It seems most have missed the other part of thi

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems you missed the other other part of this:

Unfortunately, smaller operators like Cablevision and Bright House (each of which tally millions of customers) are exempt from these restrictions for now.

What qualifies as massive?

[Anonymous Coward]

I stuck one of these in my attic and I get the advertised range and then some:
Antennacraft 85in Boom HBU Antenna UHF High-Band VHF 70 To 60 Mile Range

Damn! How much in bribes did Bush get for this?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't wait until we can vote that evil corporate boot-licker and his pet FCC lackey out of office.

I bought this one

[Anonymous Coward]

Stuck it in my attic and I get everything crystal clear from every bit of 60 miles away.

Antennacraft 85in Boom HBU Antenna UHF High-Band VHF 70 To 60 Mile Range

Who needs it?

[Kazoo the Clown]

Spend all that $$ on cable, and all you get is junk with commercials. I'm sorry, but I remember back in the late '60s when cable first arrived, and the rationale was "no commercials". For me, that rationale hasn't changed, I won't pay for stuff that is delivering more than about 1% advertising, and that 1% should be mostly restricted to trailers for other videos. I get most of my content on DVD one way or another (library, rental, purchase) or streaming from PBS. I also don't care much for Blu ray, my eyes aren't all that good and they take up too much storage on my hard drive.

Or a set of rabbit ears.

[John Hasler]

n/t

Figures..

[detritus.]

Excellent, so this should mean, since my Comcast Internet-only package requires me to tack on a $20 extra fee for the limited basic cable precisely because I can plug the coax into the TV and receive all the unencrypted over-the-air channels and a few others like C-SPAN and home shopping channels, I should be able to opt out since it would require me to also lease a box if they indeed encrypt it, right? I imagine they'd find a way around that and find a way to stick it to me.

I suspect that ultimately I will mount a tall mast on the deck of my apartment complex (I'm on the highest floor) to break the tree line and get OTA reception since my apartment complex has disconnected their antenna and plans to scrap it (there's a room full of amplifiers from the early 80s that goes to the units, no idea if they even work for the DTV frequency range). Thankfully the FCC makes it legal for me to mount an antenna for DTV reception and there's not a damn thing the complex can do about it. I warned my apartment complex that I would the moment I'm compelled to pay a dime more for something I don't even want and they refuse to fix their antenna. Like hell I'm leasing a DTV box just for OTA stuff and the shopping network!

Re:coat hanger antenna is the best bang for your b

[Anonymous Coward]

Use a good design, not the youtube crap. digitalhome.ca has great OTA TV forums with antenna design, modelling and construction.

Antenna.

[roc97007]

Just sayin'.

We get along with an antenna and a Roku. If it's not on one or the other, it's not important. Netflix costs me $7.99 a month. Screw the cable companies.

Good thing the CBC is in Canada

[WillAffleckUW]

Just saying.

FCC that!

Re:I don't think that the commenters here understa

[Anonymous Coward]

Cable companies aren't blocking free OTA itself, they can't (well maybe Comcast can have NBC transmitters shut down)

However, until now the FCC required all channels the cable company carries in an area that are available OTA to be provided in the clear digitally - now they can encrypt them. (my cable company broadcasts all channels in the 'basic cable' package CleamQAM, but I don't think that is actually required)

cable is obsolete ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I still have cable so my wife can watch the one or two shows that I can't get using Sickbeard or CouchPotato or by torrent... But once you have Sickbeard/Couchpotato and RSS feeds on your torrent setup; ditch MythTV, install XBMC and never look back. Even AppleTV and Netflix are no match for piracy in Canada. In Canada, you can't even get Game of Thrones S02 on AppleTV. The content providers are doing whatever possible to alienate their customers... Here I am, ranting to the choir ...

My 11yo son has never seen "channel surfing"... I've never explained to him where our media comes from and he's seen precious few commercials. If only he knew what the world was really like.

(Captcha: painless)

big whoop

[Anonymous Coward]

stopped watching TV a few years ago anyways....

Oh well, it was good while it lasted...

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess this means I'll just disconnect the free cable I get with my internet connection and get my local news and such from the internet as well. To TPB I go!

Re:Oh well, it was good while it lasted...

[Kazin]

Damn, didn't mean to post that as AC. Oh well!

How about the CCI Flag?

[CaptBubba]

I would really like to know if the FCC is still preventing them from setting the CCI flag on the encrypted channels. Time Warner already sets the CCI flag on everything else to "record only, no transfer" which kills multi-room functionality on TiVo, as well as preventing you from putting your legally recorded program on your smart phone to watch on the go (of course multi-room viewing works on time-warner DVRs and they hype their streaming services).

Re:It seems most have missed the other part of thi

[Anaerin]

The law requires them to offer an IP-Based unencrypted method of getting the transmissions if they broadcast them over the wire in an encrypted format. Nothing is mentioned about it being over broadband. So, if your cable provider uses encrypted cable transmissions, the cable box provided for that will have to have an Ethernet port, which provides an IP interface. It might not be a connection to the internet, it could simply be a closed network. Do remember, while the Internet runs on TCP/IP, TCP/IP is not only the internet.

Public Comment Period?

[Anonymous Coward]

Was there a public comment period before the FCC assclowns rolled over for this bullshit?

Re:Public Comment Period?

[EmagGeek]

This is the most transparent administration in history, remember?

htpc

[jimmyfrank]

sickbeard+sabnzb+giganews

For the people...

[nurb432]

....that have the money. Our government has totally lost its way.

Understandable, but need software cable card

[crow]

I can certainly understand why the cable companies want this. They have too many Internet-only customers who are getting local TV access without paying for it, and they don't want to have to send out trucks to install and remove filters. This is a perfect solution for them.

As a consumer, I don't terribly mind, as long as I can decrypt the signals. (Yes, it's a bit frustrating that my QAM tuners are now junk.) I don't want to pay a monthly fee for a cable card, along with expensive tuners that accept them. What would be much more reasonable is a software-only cable card, and there's no reason we can't have that. This would allow any QAM tuner to still be useful. The FCC should require cable companies to support this, and toss out any copy restrictions--if we are paying for it, we should get the raw digital stream to record as we see fit.

Re:Understandable, but need software cable card

[Eravnrekaree]

In many cases cable companies don'[t need it, they just put in an RF band block for channels 1-60 or whatever.

I think cable cards need to be required by the FCC and features for the program guide included. The cable card is best designed to allow for a minimalistic amount of hardware to be included in it, the whole point is for it to be a cheap device. So, the cable card probably includes a software package that is then loaded into the unit . The unit provides an interface for program guide and other user interface drawing. The software package can include program guides and everything else one would get with a set top box. Basically it can be a memory stick.

Re:Understandable, but need software cable card

[Anonymous Coward]

Your QAM tuners aren't completely junk. Hook it up to a dish. There are unencrypted satellite signals to be had, including NASA TV. Admittedly it's stuff most nobody wants to watch anyway....

does your TV have the other hardware that cable bo

[Joe_Dragon]

does your TV have the other hardware that cable boxes have??

Like

More then 1 tuner for DVR use?

UP 1GHZ QAM tuners?

A HDD for DVR use?

Hardware to decode Encrypted channels?

MPEG 4??

MPEG 2??

QAM talk back

Tv used to have cable card and the CO's F* that up as they made more by renting the box out.

Also some have tur2way that still needs a cable card and the cable still mess it up.

We've seen this sorry act before...

[erp_consultant]

Every time one of these knuckleheads at the cable monopolies pull this kind of stunt all it does is encourage people to pirate stuff. The record companies tried it too and it failed. Personally I can get all the entertainment I need with an OTA antenna, Roku and Amazon Prime. Nobody needs any of this stuff...it's entertainment. If it's there we will watch it but if it's not then we just find something else to do.

Many years ago I had a billing dispute with the cable company and cut it off. Two years with no TV whatsoever..then my GF at the time moves in and she wants it so we put it back on. But during that time I didn't miss it a bit. I read more, did more stuff outdoors...generally made better use of my time. Even now, I watch less TV and the time I do spend is watching quality programming not whatever crap the cable executive throws at me.

The point is that TV is a habit, bordering on addiction. The sooner people realize this the sooner they will spend less money and make better use of their time. The cable execs are counting on us NOT figuring this out.

What has these idiots scared is that technology keeps getting better and better and eventually someone will find a way around this entrenched monopoly. You can do what I'm doing but it's a bit clumsy still and not ideal for the non-technical types.

Re:We've seen this sorry act before...

[poofmeisterp]

Every time one of these knuckleheads at the cable monopolies pull this kind of stunt all it does is encourage people to pirate stuff.

Sorry, I have to add... "AND most of the time the pirating occurs over internet service on THEIR NETWORKS!"

/snark

Re:We've seen this sorry act before...

[erp_consultant]

Touche :-)

ACTUALLY...

[Anonymous Coward]

...local cable providers DO run their own breaks over the channel provided ones on certain channels. You'll sometimes notice at the end of a commercial break the last second or two of a different commercial. More than likely this was a barter arrangement, where the provider gets to do this. It usually is on the lesser watched channels.

some places have SD only Video Matrix switches

[Joe_Dragon]

some places have SD only Video Matrix switches

Re:some places have SD only Video Matrix switches

[MightyYar]

Yeah, I've seen that, too. That looks different - like SD video zoomed to fill a laptop screen. I'm talking about definite compression problems. The somewhat fuzzy zoomed picture doesn't bother me as much, for some reason. Or at least not as much during sporting events. There's nothing like a 70-inch screen to really magnify compression artifacts :)

OTA FTW

[WaffleMonster]

I think this change is a good thing. When people realize what they could get for free with perfect picture quality in most areas with a reasonable antenna they will be more inclined to drop cable service alltogether.

I can't think of anything more likely to drive this discovery process more than perverbial white noise.

If commercial sponsored OTA can be profitable without added eyeball tax then the expense of cable is hard to justify given digital broadcasting offers about thirty digital stations with broadcast bandwidth previously consumed by a single analog station.

WOW! cable still the full old analog line up + OTA

[Joe_Dragon]

WOW! cable still the full old analog line up + OTA HD in clear QAM other NON comcast systems still do this as well. Some even have wgn america HD and TBS HD in clear QAM.

Cell technology?

[Anonymous Coward]

Somebody has been drinking the "I wish my satellite TV provider would team up with the cell phone companies to offer unlimited data through my phone" cool-aid. It's never going to happen. Beaming RF through the air, can never compete with sending RF though a copper cable or fiber optic cable. It's for this simple reason that advances in cell technology will never catch HFC/DSL/FiOS.

Compare an Ethernet hub to an Ethernet switch - it's almost an identical scenario. In cell technology, there is one "wire", a shared medium - the air. In HFC, DSL, and FiOS, there are unlimited "wires".

Re:Cell technology?

[Anonymous Coward]

Every time a cell divides into smaller cells, those are "new wires"

Who did it - Genacowski, Obama's school chum

[raymorris]

If you're curtis who is to blame, Julius Genacowski is the same FCC chair who brought us billions of dollars in taxes they hand over to cell phone companies, obstesibly to help yhem build more 3G and 4G towers. The same guy who allowed cable companies to to slow down Hulu and other internet services that compete with cable TV. A friend of Obama since they went to college together, Genacowskalso worked on Obama's campaign.

some time ago

[Anonymous Coward]

my cable company told me the OTA HD is going away.
This is just the first steps. Their business (model) is that everyone
needs to pay for content, even legally required public service
announcements. Presidential debates, anything. Mitt is all for
this, the Big Bird jokes he makes are about this; not some very
small TV show that teaches children how to count, read, etc.

Re:some time ago

[Anonymous Coward]

my cable company told me the OTA HD is going away.
This is just the first steps. Their business (model) is that everyone
needs to pay for content, even legally required public service
announcements. Presidential debates, anything. Mitt is all for
this, the Big Bird jokes he makes are about this; not some very
small TV show that teaches children how to count, read, etc.

Since you took the d-bag route and politicized it, please explain to all of us exactly how Mitt Romney interfered with Barack Obama's current administration and Barack Obama's current FCC appointees who are currently instituting the policies you're complaining about right now.

I'm not voting for Romney because I don't trust him, but your post makes no sense other than as baldfaced partisan opportunism.

Re:Cable companies? You don't want business???

[Jason Levine]

People these days are downloading their content with Netflix and stuff like that.

Oh, don't worry about that. They'll just cap their Internet access and then their customers won't be able to download content (even legally via Netflix or similar services). Then your choices will be OTA TV (which they'll work to marginalize as much as possible), Internet TV (only a few hours a month before you hit your cap), or cable TV (easy to use but expensive).

DirecTV

[acoustix]

My parents still have cable for one reason: no box required. They will sign up with DirecTV in a heartbeat now.

Thanks cable!

What is their obligation to you?

[markdowling]

You got a free, uncontracted bonus from their cable service in the form of analog channels. Now you won't, but describe this as giving you the finger. Why should they continue to provide you content at no cost over their infrastructure when it is not mandated by statute that they do so, particularly when you retain an alternative, albeit one you consider unsightly?

I can only assume you have some sort of crazy high bandwidth cap - otherwise how will you rationalise the extra expense of a more expense net plan to take the hit Netflix will impose?

I realise this may not be a popular opinion but I really don't see what it is you think the cable company owes you.

Re:What is their obligation to you?

[Jafafa Hots]

They are required to because cable companies use public rights of way for their cables. The rights of way are typically controlled by the city, and the city generally requires that the company serve the general public interest if they are going to get to use the rights of way.

Serving the general public interest included providing the over-the-air channels that they get FREE and that they are allowed to rebroadcast for FREE in order to make sure that people don't have to have cable AND rabbit ears. Cable companies WANTED to include local channels, and they generally don't PAY for them.

So they don't get to CHARGE for them since the originator of the programming gets nothing from them.

Satellite companies use public airwaves for their transmissions.

The commons is rapidly (and immorally) becoming privatized.
Rights-of-way, eminent domain being used to give property to private companies, increasingly intrusive IP laws and the weakening of fair use, etc.

If the cable company doesn't want to feel like the owe the community something, then they can tear out and take down the cables that they run through the community's property.

Re:What is their obligation to you?

[RLaager]

Cable companies...generally don't PAY for [local channels]. So they don't get to CHARGE for them since the originator of the programming gets nothing from them.

For what it's worth, this used to be the case, but is not any more. Many local channels have switched from "must-carry", where the cable company has to carry them, but doesn't have to pay, to "retransmission consent" where they can charge the cable company. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Must-carry#United_States

Re:What is their obligation to you?

[Anonymous Coward]

I rate this post absolutely hilarious. Serving the public interest, of course, went out with serving the CEO's interest. I'm no socialist, but it's time the cities and towns simply own the cable infrastructure.

Re:What is their obligation to you?

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone who works for a cable company, I feel I should correct/clarify a couple of things for you:

Cable companies DO have to pay local TV stations for rebroadcast rights...LOTS. This is somewhat ironic since the bulk of their ad revenue is based upon how many eyeballs their ads are in front of. Without cable rebroadcast, those eyeballs, and therefor those revenues DROP. Two or three of our local stations routinely pull the "Attention cable company x subscriber: your channel y programming may be taken away after date z...call your cable company NOW!" crawler when they want to renegotiate their payola and we say "no". Don't you think that having to broadcast ads for a station that you (1) helped generate the viewership for and (2) have to PAY for the privilege of airing is fundamentally unfair? I do. But everybody likes their bread buttered on both sides, I suppose.

A huge (and I mean HUGE) number of plant issues that affect quality of service for paying subscribers (i.e. pixelation on your TV, slow modem speeds) are generated by illegal hook-ups to the system. This is because of an RF phenomenon collectively referred to as ingress. Ingress is just extraneous signal that gets onto the plant from bad/loose RF connectors, inferior splitters, shoddy workmanship, inadequately shielded coax cable, bad TV tuners, etc. I've lost count of how many times I have gone to a trouble call for an offline modem and found that the problem was being caused by a neighbor with a shoddy, illegal hookup. Encrypting EVERYTHING takes away the impetus for people to hook up illegally, which cuts down on plant issues and therefor maintains a better quality of service for everyone.

Re:What is their obligation to you?

[Anonymous Coward]

or maybe someone can help do that for them

Re:It seems most have missed the other part of thi

[Anonymous Coward]

considering that today's elderly probably spent most of their middle-age years making money off the young, maybe this is just karma coming back to bite them

Grey Hoverman

[Anonymous Coward]

Where I live, there are 7 local television channels. They are all digital. I built an antenna (actually 3 antennas), each of which points at a tower. Three towers, 7 channels, all digital, higher data rates than WiFi. I paid $193- to build and install all of it (it feeds 3 tv's, there are amplifiers at each TV, the digital 'signal cliff' on the weakest TV is about 4 bars (out of 18), and the weakest channel comes in at 14 bars. It *is* affected by weather, but less so than satellite signals, and the worst I've ever seen is a very bad summer storm, that dropped the signal of one tower down to 9 bars (no dropouts or artificats, just a weaker signal), before the storm had finished the signal was as high as on a clear day. I don't pay cable/satellite/telco TV-over-wire suppliers any money (the cheapest in $90 *per month* and I would get a few more channels than what I get now for free).

win-win for cableco.

[CrAlt]

Now they get to collect equipment fee's from those freeloading "lifeline" B1 customers.

AND

They no longer have hire and pay cable guys to physically disconnect people. The network is 100% encrypted.

A new revenue stream and one lest cost.

Freedom to install a terrestrial antenna array

[havana9]

I suppose that after this move, everybody is now entitled to put an aerial system to receive TV, even on condos or homeowner association controlled zones. Something like this: http://www.associazionemarconi.com/public/images/castel_debole_13_8_2012d.jpg I suppose that due the first amentement you've the right to receive OTA free channels, even in the USA.

yeah great

[Tastecicles]

way to squeeze Joe Consumer, motherfuckers!

TV

[ledow]

I don't live in the US, but I kept my TV when I moved out of the parental home, because it was a habit that I'd been ingrained into.

Then I realised that, actually, there wasn't anything worth paying the amount I was.

I don't watch sports.

The movies that I watch I bought on DVD first and the only things on TV were outdated and (usually) junk and if they weren't, they were more expensive than going to a video rental shop (yep, they were still around back then).

I thought I'd watch the science and documentary channels. Turns out that I learned more from a box set of David Attenborough and a handful of Mythbusters than I ever did anything else (and, again, the cost and repetition of such things means that they are only cost-effective the first few months). Occasionally there's an episode on something I'm interested in and it invariably has all the science content of a modern "Royal Institution Christmas Lecture" (which nowadays consists of kiddies being amazed that something goes bang).

The comedy channels? Apparently my definition that comedy should be funny isn't shared by the people who work there. Apart from a few 20+ year old comedies / sketch shows / stand-up routines that I either owned every episode of or could get them all for free online (legally), there was nothing worth worrying about.

The general entertainment channels? Shoot me now. Tacky documentaries about things I don't care about, celebrity shows, makeovers, "My dad's a transvestite", who cares?

The "home" channels? Watch highly-overpaid people knock down perfectly-good houses and spend millions "revamping" them to look like something out of a design brochure that will fall apart the minute you want to put up a shelf? No thanks.

The shopping channels and the religious channels? Please, I only watch them to laugh at them and pick holes in their claims.

Hell, even the adult channels - who the hell would pay for them?

And this was many years ago. I do still have a TV but, outside of pre-recorded media, it's there for a known, specified, recognised purpose - to have some noise in the background while I eat breakfast or similar.

A similar move was mooted in the UK - FreeView, our free-to-air digital terrestrial service, wanted to encrypt a load of channels. All that happened was that viewers dropped dramatically for them all. Sky (digital satellite) provide the back-end of a free-to-air service where they do the same (pay-for the Sky premium channels, or get the free-to-air with just buying a box + dish). And cable, you've *always* had to pay for the box, but you have to pay for anything decent.

To be honest, all it means is that I have a Freeview TV and if they start cutting channels, or start raising costs and cutting people out, the TV becomes a device solely aimed at it's primary function - a display device. I won't even bother to connect an aerial / dish / cable to it. It'll just be there to watch what I download or already own.

When I was a kid, we had literally 4 channels. That was it. And Saturday night TV was something worth watching and still some of the best entertainment that they play on repeat 30 years later. When what we Brits think of as "American-style TV" came over in the form of Sky, we were astounded by the number of channels and the amount of content. But very, very quickly we learned that it's just the same amount of good stuff diluted over more channels.

Now, there's little good stuff at all and diluted over the number of channels available, the value is next to nothing. Hell, a lot of people had to think twice about buying a £20 adaptor to turn their TV digital, and hardly anyone had one on EVERY TV that they own until very recently (where the TV's have had it built-in for long enough that it's absorbed into basic replacement prices as people throw out CRT's and put flat-screens in to save room).

TV is dying, dead, gone. It's background noise. Kids are being brought up to get the content they want at one click a

Re:TV

[Anonymous Coward]

A similar move was mooted in the UK - FreeView, our free-to-air digital terrestrial service, wanted to encrypt a load of channels. All that happened was that viewers dropped dramatically for them all. Sky (digital satellite) provide the back-end of a free-to-air service where they do the same (pay-for the Sky premium channels, or get the free-to-air with just buying a box + dish). And cable, you've *always* had to pay for the box, but you have to pay for anything decent.

I don't remember Freeview suggesting they'd encrypt. I remember seeing that the BBC wanted to introduce some sort of "DRM" for certain HD programmes at the behest of the rights holders (that only official PVRs would care about and MythTV and others would just ignore), but not full on encryption of the video stream. Are you confusing Freeview with the wider DVB-T platform? There is nothing to stop any channel choosing to encrypt - for example ESPN does because they're a subscription service - but it means they are not part of the Freeview "system".

More than Cable

[DaKong]

There's a deeper point in what you're saying, too. My kids don't know what Disneyland or Mickey Mouse is because Disney has been so adamant about locking away their content. The result is they are rendering themselves culturally irrelevant.

The "content creators," who you and I know are really "content distributors," are cutting their own throats. By pricing themselves out of the market and making it increasingly difficult to do business with them, they are driving people to find substitutes. And these days there are lots and lots of substitutes.

Ads

[aclarke]

Don't forget the cost of spending your life staring at a screen while people yell at you to buy things you don't need. You're paying for that privilege, too. iTunes (and torrents, for that matter) come without ads. With cable, you're paying a company to waste your life away staring at ads. That's the biggest cost, in my opinion.

Re:Ads

[swb]

True, but I'm starting my 11th year with a Tivo, and I seldom watch anything "live" except for those rare times when my wife wants to invite people over for sports (which we never watch ourselves...) or when she insists on watching something we already record "live".

When she does that, I can't even get her to start with a 15 minute delay so we can at least FF through about half the commercial breaks before we catch up to real time.

Personally, I kind of wish there was something like Tivo for broadcast TV & cable that enabled you to record any program on any channel without a monthly subscription but that was "pay-per-view", so I only paid for actually watching a specific episode or show.

Over the long haul, I probably can't manage more than about 6 hours of TV viewing anyway, regardless of the source, due to time conflicts with the kids and other activities. Even at iTunes current season per episode pricing, I'd at least feel like I was getting my money's worth and I would probably not watch some of the marginal network shows like Revolution and watch more HBO/Showtime type shows that I otherwise wade through on my 2-disc-at-a-time Netflix account.

Re:Ads

[afidel]

The solution to the ads problem is a PC based DVR, HDHomeRun Prime does CableCard, then you run the recorded shows through comskip and voila, ad free tv. I'm actually running a standard HDHomeRun because my cable company doesn't suck and instead of encrypting the heck out of everything they went the opposite direction and got permission from their content partners to put the SD content on the wire unencrypted and they pass the ATSC HD signal from the broadcast channels on without encryption as well (and without re-encoding them!). It would be wonderful if Wide Open West was available as an alternative everywhere because then there would be some real competition in the cable market.

Re:Ads

[aclarke]

Yeah, been there done that with SageTV. Then we moved to HD and all the channels were encrypted. I figured out that I was paying about $15 per hour of TV actually watched, and dumped my satellite subscription.

It's still an awful lot of time and hassle just to watch TV. For me, I think it was as much about the hobby of setting up a DVR than it was about actually watching TV.

Mod parent up!

[GlobalEcho]

This AC knows what he/she is saying

A cable box for my Mom?

[Rob the Bold]

Seriously, a cable box for my Mom? That's gonna work. Until she tries to change channels for the first time. Because talking her through getting her "screen" back on the computer wasn't fun enough, I get a family tech-support call for TV now every time the box and/or TV get screwed up? And I doubt I'm the only guy here with an elderly relative that couldn't work a cable box remote to save their life.

Re:It seems most have missed the other part of thi

[xemit]

The only problem with that is that on the Internet side, the ISPs are trying to make customers pay if they are "power users". It's not much of a problem right now, but when more and more people start streaming video, sooner or later more people will fall into this category, which ends up in overrage like fees.

AtdheNet.TV on a TV

[tepples]

AtdheNet.TV

Which set-top box do you recommend for use with AtdheNet.TV? Bear in mind that the TV on which this head of household watches sports is an early-adopter projection CRT HDTV included with the house, so it doesn't take HDMI, and it'll need 1080i component out. Or should one just buy a separate PC for the TV room and use a VGA to composite converter from SewellDirect.com?

at least for football that's not on CBS/ABC/NBC/FOX or out of market games.

How about NHL ice hockey? Some games of the NHL Stanley Cup finals last year were on Versus.

Re:It seems most have missed the other part of thi

[Anonymous Coward]

No, no one missed "the other part". Read the article carefully. Smaller companies need not support either option, one of the two options is on "the honor system", and the other option allows the cable company to charge rental fees on the new device after 2 years. I don't see how this was anything but a give-away to the cable companies.

Back on OTA for about 5 years now with few complaints. OTA + Hulu free is a pretty decent combination.

Re:It seems most have missed the other part of thi

[Chowderbags]

Wait... so they're encrypting the channels and then releasing the way to unencrypt it to open source projects? What exactly would be the gain here? I mean, the only thing it will do is mean that third party PVR makers will be put out of commission whenever the cable company changes it's standard... oh, I see.

Does this affect more than just Clear QAM?

[yoda-dono]

The more I read into the article (and links), the more I wonder if "their most basic cable programming", "basic service tier", and "accelerate cable operators’ transition to all-digital networks" means more than just encrypting Clear QAM. What I'm afraid of is if this means that the standard definition "basic cable" and "expanded basic cable" services that cable companies still pump out for non-HDTVs will be digitized (as per the transition phrasing) and encrypted, too. Sort of a cable version of the analog to digital broadcast switch, complete with digital converter boxes (though without government coupons this time).

My MythTV backend currently records local network HDTV broadcasts through antenna/HDHomeRun, and has an analog SD tuner for expanded basic cable, which I'd hate to see come to an end like this. It may not have been good looking picture, but analog TV at its end represented hard earned progress and freedom from where television had almost gone, we'd completely moved away from the oppression of cable boxes and could build personal video recorders to allow all manner of viewing options and flexibility, and then we simply allowed them to take almost all of that away from us when they switched to encrypted digital services; if this last bastion of television freedom gets snuffed out so soon, it would be very sad tidings. Needless to say, I'm not interested in subscribing to TV services that don't allow me to watch and record however I see fit and with whatever operating system I choose (cablecard, I'm looking at you on this one), so this would be the end of premium TV for me, something I'd never wanted it to come to.

"The days of plugging a TV into the wall and getting cable are coming to an end", indeed.

Read to the end.

[poofmeisterp]

That's right, you OWN those bastards that are splitting off someone else's cable to get cleaner OTA broadcasts. When you do, they'll have to go to the trouble of moving their TV/antenna/both or *gasp* buying an antenna.

Now the logic here makes so sense. And wait, is that what you're really addressing here in the first place?

If the person can't afford cable, and can't even afford an antenna or other means of clearly receiving OTA broadcasts, you cutting off their ability to have free better service is sure gonna make them spend WAY more than they have to purchase your monthly service (and Hell, maybe even add-ons)!

No, that doesn't make sense. So the logic is that.... you don't want people splitting off coax in-house (via paid service) so that there can be more than one channel watched on more than one broadcast receiver at a time? That will get you two things: more money for more 'converter/dvr boxes', and........ Oh, wait, that's all it gets you. More paid service. An extra $5 a fucking month (that's what Time Warner charges for extra boxes). That doesn't account for the cost of the boxes and the maintenance / service work associated.

Okay, so you're pissing people off and going to this level of effort to get some extra money (which will make you lose customers as well as gain some extra small bills), so it's a wash if not a loss. Makes no sense.

So what DOES make sense then? WHY would they do this?

How about the 'OTA broadcast networks' requiring that cable companies provide them with logged use data in exchange for a big cut in licensing costs? Could that be it? Hmm.

HDHomerun Prime cablecard

[bobbutts]

Works for me. Just updated from older clear qam cards. HDHomerun is an awesome product in general. Watched on Win 7, Mint xfce (with mythtv), and Android (with xbmc)

Do not need a box

[mattack2]

You don't need to rent "a box". A Cable Card will do just fine. (You can own the box that uses the Cable Card.)

BTW, at least from discussion on tivocommunity from people more familiar with the new regulation, the OTA rebroadcasts are STILL required to be copy freely (e.g. able to be downloaded from your Tivo or other device to a computer, etc.)

This will bite them in the rear end

[Orion Blastar]

most Cable TV subscribers have the "Basic Package" of $20/month or whatever of 20 to 40 channels they hook up an old analog SD TV into without a box. They couldn't even figure out those HD encoder coupons or why they needed an encode for local TV. If the signal is scrambled and encrypted for the OTA channels they won't know what is happening and will call up the Cable company complaining about signal reception problems.

Yeah you need a box, we'll rent you one for $X/month, they'll claim. They'll send the box, and the customer won't figure out how to hook it up. Then the cable company will send a contractor out for $300 to install it for them. At that point they will just cancel cable TV because it is too expensive and complex to figure out.

You see Cable TV makes a lot of money with the basic subscription that only needs a coaxial cable installed for each TV because it is the simplest of ways to connect to watch TV and also the cheapest. People don't want Satellite because it needs a box, and also a Dish to align, and when it rains the signal is out. People don't want U-verse because it needs an Internet connection and also needs boxes and if the Internet connection goes out so does their TV signal. The basic cable setup is the cheapest and the simplest and it also works with old analog TV sets that are "cable ready". If the cable company complicates that by requiring a box, they will actually lose customers, and thus lose income.

For a majority of your customers, try to make it as simple as possible for them to install your service and use it.

OTA is not free for all Cable Companies

[Anonymous Coward]

OTA isn't free to all cable companies. I think if a cable company does not pay to carry a station they shouldn't be allowed to encrypt it, but I see nothing objectionable about it if they are paying to carry it. Why should someone get to watch the channel for free through their cable company's network because they have their internet? That's just silly.
 
Want it free? Get the antenna. Not good enough, the cable company is actually obligated to let you subscribe to just a basic tier for a fairly low price and if it's encrypted, they have to give you a box for free to decrypt it.