Coming Set-top Box Mandate May Help Break Pay TV Firms' Hold Over Viewers (latimes.com)

Posted by Soulskill on Monday November 9, 2015 @02:33AM from the cut-the-cord-and-the-set-top-anchor dept.

Joe_Dragon sends a report from the LA Times about proposed regulations that could disrupt the cable industry's hold on consumers by targeting set-top boxes. These boxes are required to view most pay-TV programming these days, and consumers often require multiples if they have more than one TV. The rental fees add up to almost $20 billion in revenue for the industry each year. Yet the technology within these boxes is nothing special, and alternatives could easily arise if there was incentive to create them. "The changes aren't coming fast enough for some lawmakers and consumer advocates as well as tech companies such as Google Inc., which are eager to jump into the set-top box market. They want the Federal Communications Commission to require that pay TV providers make their services more easily compatible with third-party set-top boxes or similar devices. ... Such a mandate could allow consumers to access their pay TV and streaming services through one device instead of having to switch between two or more. And it could lead to innovations such as an ability to search for programming across services to determine, for example, whether a movie is available on Netflix or on-demand via a pay TV provider."

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Re:Good. by bigpat · 2015-11-09 02:55 · Score: 3, Interesting

Good, hope this will accelerate a CableCard-like standard for IPTV like it did for cable systems. I love my home-brew DVR, and I'm not willing to switch to Google Fiber or AT&T UVerse until third-party TV equipment can work with their service.
Yes, paying $18 per month "rental" for a $100 device really sucks and it feels like the bad old days of Grandma renting her phone from The Phone Company for $10 per month. The encryption keys can and should be simply software based...forget the CableCard, they still have those supposedly and nobody uses them because they don't offer key services such as the channel guide, VOD, etc. It could be so much simpler and you could just register your device ID and an open standard protocol negotiates the keys to unlock any encrypted content and the cable companies could provide the other services in a more standard way that encourages hardware competition.
The cable companies are too big.