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Cable Lobby Steams Up Over FCC Set-Top Box Competition Plan (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Cable TV industry lobby groups expressed their displeasure with a Federal Communications Commission plan to bring competition to the set-top box market, which could help consumers watch TV on different devices and thus avoid paying cable box rental fees.
FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler proposed new rules that would force pay-TV companies to give third parties access to TV content, letting hardware makers build better set-top boxes. Customers would be able to watch all the TV channels they're already paying cable companies for, but on a device that they don't have to rent from them. The rules could also bring TV to tablets and other devices without need for a rented set-top box. The system would essentially replace CableCard with a software-based equivalent.
FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler proposed new rules that would force pay-TV companies to give third parties access to TV content, letting hardware makers build better set-top boxes. Customers would be able to watch all the TV channels they're already paying cable companies for, but on a device that they don't have to rent from them. The rules could also bring TV to tablets and other devices without need for a rented set-top box. The system would essentially replace CableCard with a software-based equivalent.
Cable TV industry lobby groups expressed their displeasure with a Federal Communications Commission plan to bring competition to the set-top box market, which could help consumers watch TV on different devices and thus avoid paying cable box rental fees.
Cable TV industry lobby groups expressed some of the highest praise they can give for a Federal Communications Commission plan to bring competition to the set-top box market
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
But the cablecos just made the Cablecards a pita to install (some requiring a technician to come out to your house to install a simple card), and making the slot so hard to implement that only a few companies like Tivo even tried to support them, then adding in shit like SJV to make them useless for certain channels, then charging RENTAL FEES for the cards. The rental fee was the ballsiest move of them all. And they got away with it too, of course, because lobbyists and campaign brib....contributions.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
It's funny how most cable companies allow their subscribers to purchase their own cable modems and routers, but now those same companies balk at the idea of their subscribers buying their own set-top box.
Do you have any idea how long it took and how much effort they expended to make sure that the Cable Card standard was never actually usable? And this new standard basically says they have to pass the data to an outside provider without being able to force the electronics retailer to have to go to cable labs which helped to make sure the process is painful and you can't win without giving in?
My god, people might not have to spend $20 a month on a DVR they don't own!
It's nice that the FCC is trying to bring about change, but device rental fees are a MASSIVE revenue stream for cable companies. IF they allow this, expect cable rates to go up $10/month. Or more.
And if they want to raise rates on that portion of their service, fine. We can decide if we want it based on its own inherent value. That's different than advertising a certain rate, but then you can't get service unless you pay a box ransom fee.
Reading through the FCC's summary, I can't tell whether this is a good or a bad thing. In principle it sounds good, but certainly there's going to be some sort of certifications involved somewhere, and I doubt open source stuff like mythtv is going to be able to pass the requirements to get certified. Cable card may be less than ideal in implementation as far as open source is concerned, but at least there, if you've got a cooperating cable provider, you can access much of that content in it's digital form, which is better than the previous options of analog capture.
So the question we need to ask is whether, from an open source perspective, this is actually going to improve things for us (I'm definitely skeptical on that), keep it about the same, or make it worse.
2. If it's software-based, it'll be cracked and pirated within a month of release.
You would think so, wouldn't you. However, Windows Media Center is software based, and yet (as far as I know) nobody has managed to crack it to enable open source software to mimic WMC and trick the cable card devices into giving full access to the Copy Once and Copy Never content.
If they uses the IPTV approach, then they could just leverage devices people already have, such as the Apple TV, an Android TV based device or maybe a tablet.
Maybe this bitter medicine may actually help cable companies wake up and improve their service and the way people watch the content? There are people who still like the programmed content stream, but not necessarily the limitations on which device they can watch it on.
One company they should be copying: http://www.free.fr/adsl/freebo... (just use Google translate). It may be solution limited to France, but I am envious every time I read their offering.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
lol, that's you first mistake -- thinking there's an actual "off" mode.
On DVRs at least, there literally is not an Off state with the box plugged in. On some models the difference between On and Standby is only 1W because the the only difference is in on state the box is outputting a video signal and in the other it's not.
The FCC learned pretty good from how the Cable Companies subverted the Cable Card mandate. This one forces them to pass the data out of their system via open standards, it allows them to continue to pass on the restrictions and other stuff they are using but the key here is everything is in software. There won't be any hardware to rent from the cable company. This is going to make it very difficult for them to subvert like cable card.
They subverted cable card by getting the FCC to OK creating a certification laboratory. They called this cable labs and they used it to throw so much red tape in front of companies that it became nearly impossible to get hardware through. On top of this they would add conditions about software and other things that they had no business putting into the certification process. On top of this at first they made the cable card process extremely complex to begin with including partial implementation so that anyone that bought a cable card device would find the process either broken or impossibly hard which would bias the public about cable card being bad.
The software option is going to block all this. They have to pass the data out in an open published way. The FCC just basically made them implement an API and pass everything out. Because there is a lack of hardware there can't be a certification laboratory and because they are required to use open ISO approved standards they can't game the software side.
I'm sure if there is a way to subvert the process they will find it but this cuts almost all of their current methods off. It should be easy to develop hardware and software systems to implement the standards and if the cable company isn't complying with the standard you should be able to complain to the FCC.
If you're like me and get your TV and internet through a coaxial cable connected to a fiber network you should favor local loop unbundling. Make the local loop a public utility and let the content providers compete for my business, both internet and TV. Let the content providers pay the local loop utility for access to my business (yes I know they'd pass the cost on to us but as a utility the local loop would have regulated rates). Then you wouldn't have to regulate the content providers (and ex cable companies) at all. Wouldn't that be a free market?