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Obama Urges Opening Cable TV Boxes To Competition (npr.org)
An anonymous reader writes: President Obama is publicly supporting the FCC's proposal to help viewers buy cable boxes to spur competition and help subscribers save money. Basically, the proposal would require TV channels to sell their content to third-party groups, like Google and others who would sell their own devices. The president's backing of the FCC proposal is part of a broader White House initiative to spur competition. In a Yahoo News interview, Obama compared the cable box issue to earlier moves by the government to open up the telephone system in the 1980's. Obama said, "Across the board, if we have more players who can potentially participate, fewer barriers to entry, the rules aren't rigged, then you get more people trying to get your business and you get better products at cheaper prices."
Just about every ISP is a media distributor as well. Don't have any draconian usage caps? This is one way to get slapped with them.
Hard to force them to open up the market with the lobbying they do. If the FCC succeeds and forces it to open, good luck when you start realizing your cap does not go very far when you add all that programming to your monthly bandwidth and the cable companies look get their profit in overage fees.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
Eliminate Cable Boxes Entirely. If you want Cable, it should be an entirely Clear QAM Affair with channels that make logical sense.
The reason Cable boxes exist, is that when a cable came into being, TV was split between VHF and UHF. Cable was "more VHF Channels" that went beyond the number 13. You could tine 2-13 on any Analogue TV set. If you wanted 14 or higher, you needed a Cable ready TV, or a Cable Box.
Then sometime in the 1990s, it became: Cable Boxes are the Gatekeepers to the Premium Channels.
Now it's: Cable Boxes are required to access cable at all.
The requirement should be clear. Universal Clear QAM. Flat Rate Neutral Pricing.
Keep up the good work Whilpshelsh.
Maybe some articles will make double digit posts.
Oh for the days of Dice...
We are past the transitional period when a company should be able to get a city to sign up for a monopoly provider.
The cable should be open to anyone that wants to provide programming.
You should literally have a choice of cable providers on the cable to your house like you do to the roku in your house.
Opening the cable box to competition is a joke- a mockery.
It should no longer be legal to allow one cable company to have a monopoly over a geographical area.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Too many providers and ISPs are going back to the old Bell model of leasing the equipment to the user for huge markups like they used to do with telephones. For example AT&T U-Verse ADSL or VDSL modems can only be leased from the company at what is now $7 per month, when it was $4 originally, and it is soon going to $9 a month I've been told.
This is the same scam that the Bell companies did with telephone leases by inching up costs until you pay hundreds for the same piece of equipment.
You cannot purchase a DSL modem/router/gateway from the carrier nor from a store either since the service authenticates the equipment to make sure that it is the leased one and only authorizes it to work.
What a scam and where's the FCC for the rest of us who have no choice to choose!
Tell them to just say NO to company set top boxes.
Yours,
The Ghost of Nancy Reagan
Back in the 2000's I was closely involved in the CableCard business. Although the thing was (more or less) working the Cable companies did all that was possible to shut it down (overly complicated procedure to get cable card, low quality implementation ...). Since then I am now closely involved with European equivalent to CableCard, the DVB-CI+. Many operators are actively supporting this specification and surprisingly the TV subscription cost in Europe are two to three times lower than in Europe.
Instead on pushing TV content to companies who are already making way too much money for their (our ?) own good. Why not revive the CableCard with today technologies. The latest DVB-CI+ specifications is based on USB, wouldn't that be sexy to just have to plug a USB stick in your TV to enable pay channels ?
One of the big problems is outdated infrastructure. Cable is pretty much ubiquitous now, but there's a limit to the amount of available bandwidth that's shared between analog cable, digital cable, video on demand, and internet access. Analog cable is wasteful and it's in everyone's interest to discontinue that everywhere as soon as possible. That said, bandwidth is limited and digital cable channels are restricted by the needs of the other services. That limitation is addressed with switched digital video, but it's not ideal. Furthermore, we should want continual improvements to video on demand and internet speeds. The limited bandwidth seems to preclude competing services on the same infrastructure. Rolling out fiber is a great way to increase the bandwidth, but that infrastructure is only available in a few cities. Just as we made it a priority to get most homes broadband internet a couple of decades ago, we need to push fiber to everyone.
If bandwidth is plentiful thanks to large amounts of fiber being laid, then there's room for competing services in the same markets. I don't see any reason why Comcast, Charter, and other providers shouldn't compete in the same markets instead of being granted local monopolies. Deregulating telecommunications is a great example of how this can work and how it should apply to cable and probably to cellular. You'll pay two bills, one for infrastructure and one for the services. Set requirements like the ability for consumers to record programming, that open formats be used for IPTV allowing consumers to bring their own cable boxes, and make these conditions to deregulation.
One of the biggest mistakes is to allow utilities to be monopolies subject to regulation by a public service commission. We'd be far better off if we deregulated the markets and strongly enforced antitrust laws. As long as barriers to entry are low, laws against collusion are strongly enforced, mergers and acquisitions are strongly regulated, and anticompetitive behavior is not tolerated, consumers will win.
We don't do competition here, just monopoly.
Why is Snark Required?
TV viewership is declining, as a result the peoples increasingly awake and may not tolerate Marxist race baiting in the future. You wouldn't want a populist president? Be a good ally, subscribe to #MTVDecoded because #BlackLivesMatter.
Why is this not a valid question?
But this is just one part of the raw deal customers are getting from the cable companies. Without real competition on the ground there will never be end to the abuse by cable monopolies. There are other agencies in the municipal areas that have easements and rights of way. Power companies have lines to every home. Phone, water and sewer lines too. All of them can string fiber or cable to their street corner control boxes or something similar. There are many promising solutions for the last furlong. Wireless in the loop etc.
What the government can do is to find a frequency band in the spectrum and allocate it for the wireless in the loop technologies. Bring real competition to the cable/phone markets, then set top box abuse will take care of it itself.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Meaning everyone needs a cablebox. Even cable ready TVs will no longer work, unless it has a cablecard slot.
In Netherlands (you know, "Amsterdam") for 70e a month, and you get 200 mbps downstream (20 up), and all the channels. NO CAPS, you can download all day and night. You have a choice of getting a smart decoder/cable box or just a dumb CI+ card that you put in the smart TV.
I've opted for the CI+ because it's easier to use whole thing with just one remote. Additional it uses less power. The TVs have ratings on all major electronic website saying if they are supported by major cable companies. My TV is not supported, yet CI+ card works just fine.
So... better believe :)
It's in the best interests of the country. TV is a means to inform people and educate them. It also is recreational, which can improve the morale of people. An informed, educated, and entertained populace will also be more productive. Competition and open standards also encourages innovation. Congress and the President have the time to work on this issue. The government has become less productive in carrying out its legislative duties, as indicated by the decline in the number of bills passed by Congress and signed or vetoed by the President. The world operates at a faster pace than in past decades, so there probably ought to be more legislative work being done than in the past. While the number of bills doesn't take into account that the complexity of legislation may have increased, it still seems like there's less work getting done. In the present day, with the ubiquity of rapid transit, it sure seems like being a legislator ought to be a full time job. It's true that the amount of recesses by Congress has decreased, but it still seems excessive. Presidents also do a lot of travel and spend a significant amount of time campaigning, especially during the first term. Addressing this issue almost certainly isn't taking away from time needed by Congress or the President to address more pressing matters.
Unless the city planned ahead and buried extra conduits in advance, the cost of 'just adding another wire' is the cost of tearing up and rebuilding the roads and/or sidewalks, as well as the cost of the inconvenience to commuters affected by the construction.
TV viewership is declining, as a result the peoples increasingly awake and may not tolerate Marxist race baiting in the future. You wouldn't want a populist president? Be a good ally, subscribe to #MTVDecoded because #BlackLivesMatter.
I wish more black people really thought that black lives matter. One of the leading causes of death for young black men? Getting shot ... not by racist whites, but ... by other young black men.
I don't hate anyone. But if I was part of the establishment just after the Civil Rights Movement and I had money and connections, and I really, really, truly hated black people and I wanted to damage them as a group as much as possible? I would use the media and popular culture to encourage them to adopt a thug culture that glorifies violence, hard drugs, criminal behavior, and denigration of women. I would let them believe this is their own counter-culture that they can identify with. When they create BET and show real content, I would use a major media company to buy it up so it can show more of the worst thug-culture black stereotypes.
But of course if you suggest that powerful people will abuse the system towards their ... proclivities, or if you are aware that the CIA was instrumental in introducing crack cocaine to black neighborhoods quite deliberately, or otherwise you think for yourself based on what is true and not what you find tasteful ... well then you're a tin-foil hatter, right?
Obama clearly said that health insurance will be cheaper than the cable television bill (meaning less than $100). Is he trying to reduce the cable bill, expecting that healthcare insurance will just follow?
In reality, it is the healthcare system that needs real competition and deregulation. It looks like his teleprompter made an error.
P.S. I am biased. I have never had cable television service in my adult life. Internet has everything, even television streams
'Surprising to some, including the chairman, I suspect, is that we already know the answer to that question. Set-top box prices are (often) regulated using an FCC formula designed to ensure that the rates for such boxes are based on "the actual cost of regulated equipment and installations plus a reasonable profit."'
http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/technology/268004-the-fccs-cynical-set-top-box-play
So other then Google wanting to track and advertise to you better, I don't see the point. I already use internet that comes with my condo, an antenna and I have my choice of services like Sling, Vue, Netflix, Amazon that my Tivo box runs quite well thank you. Way more TV available then I want to watch.
Things are changing faster then the FCC can manage them anyway, IMHO.
When he signs some legislation on the subject, I will give a fuck what Obomber thinks about CATV boxes. Until then, he's just flapping his face in the wind, kind of like when claiming to give a shit about human rights while we bomb hospitals and drone strike children.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
[...] if you are aware that the CIA was instrumental in introducing crack cocaine to black neighborhoods quite deliberately [...]
More 'white peoples made me do it' non-sense. Fuck off.
Leading cause of death among young Black men = participation in the White man's criminal justice system.
Why not do what we really need and eliminate the data caps?
that the cable company provides that you could insert into your own cable box. /sarcasm
It's in the best interests of the country. TV is a means to inform people and educate them.
I see that you're of mere average intelligence (if that)...
This has nothing - NOTHING - at all to do with "consumer choice" and is all about Obama and the FCC trying to maintain their power base with the cable lobbyists (Disney, Comcast, Time Warner are all huge contributors to the political parties)
Cable TV is DYING. Why do I need decreased cable box regulations when most people are now streaming off their phones and pads and most TVs are coming with built in streaming services now.
Why force cable-tv to open their boxes when the market is already abandoning them in droves for keeping their content locked (and which it still will be after this initiative).
Why not force cable companies to offer their internet services individually without tying them cable TV (Comcast) - Why not force initiatives to make internet faster and cheaper FCC? Obama?
Because the FCC and Obama ARE IN BED with the cable companies and trying to prop up their business model so the cash continues to flow to the right people.
But hey, awesome job Obama!
Remove the monopolies. Seriously, we should be limiting the monopolies.
Fastest way is to say that no gov can proclaim a monopoly for fiber. In addition, we should break apart the monopolies and require that any transmission over a monopoly be split off from the non-monopoly part.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
All questions are valid, some are just stupid flamebait. But, all right, let's assume you're one of those children who think that cable TV is an antiquated relic and you have no idea how big and important it is. Even then, even in the case where you might be genuinely curious what all the fuss is about, phrasing your question as just another attack on the president renders it worthless as a means of furthering conversation. So... Hm. I guess not all questions are valid.
In 1996-7 timeframe, the telecom act mandated retail access for cable boxes. This led to the open cable project at CableLabs which developed a portable middleware (OpenCable Application Platform, OCAP) and a removable security device (POD). The development of the middleware took nearly 10 years for development and acceptance starting in 1999. It is now legacy!
"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!" -- Dr. Strangelove
i wrote a comment about this for the red site.
The FCC is essentially trying to create a software-based replacement for CableCard.
CableCARDs were an olive branch from the FCC to cable companies to let them still control the signal transmission protocol but have to have a standard interface for TVs (CableCARDs). Cable companies resisted the proliferation of CableCARDs so much that it killed them before they ever became a thing, just like cable companies wanted. The FCC seems to understand that cable companies are unwilling to act in good faith so now they are standardizing mandating the protocol that set-top boxes use. By mandating the use of a standard open protocol, anyone can implement the equivalent of a CableCARD. However, now that TVs are coming with serious processors in them, i think the new generation of TVs will be decoding this standardized protocol on their own. While a good thing, this also means a tighter integration of network based streaming video services which sounds good but has proven to be poorly implemented on "Smart TVs".
If you are skeptical about the effect this might have then you should just look at what happened with cable modems. Before the DOCSIS standard, cable modems were all ISP specific, expensive and slow which is what happened with the set top box. After the DOCSIS standard, things got faster, more compatible and far less expensive.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Clear QAM signals over cable would work if Cable TV were a binary thing - you subscribe and you get all the channels, or you don't subscribe and you get nothing.
The cable box (or cable card) functions to limit the channels to the one you subscribe to. Channels in the basic package are usually transmitted unencrypted and can be tuned into without a cable box (I have my parents' TV set up this way). Pay channels and channels in higher tier packages are encrypted, and the cable box (which stores the decryption keys, same as a cable card) is used to decrypt them. As I have no interest in sports, and the most expensive channel in the non-movie channel lineup is ESPN, I rather prefer it this way. I just wish they'd regulate the price cable companies charge for a cable card to about $1-$2/mo. Some cable companies charge as much to rent a cable card as to rent a cable box.
Anyhow, this story isn't really about cable boxes. Those were taken care of with the Federal mandate requiring cable TV networks to provide cable cards. You can buy your own cable box or equivalent (like a HDHomeRun), rent a cable card from your cable company, and it'll work. What this story is really about is breaking the vertical monopoly the cable TV companies hold. They own the pipes going to your home (the physical cabling), and they also control what content flows through those pipes (the programming you subscribe to). Requiring TV channels to sell their content to third parties for viewing over the third party devices, and requiring cable TV companies to honor such agreements by relaying the programs to such devices (at a fixed fee paid for by the device manufacturer) breaks that monopoly.
It's analogous to how we tried to add competition to DSL lines. Your local phone company still owns the physical phone lines leading to your home. But they're required by law to allow other companies to sell DSL service over those lines. The DSL service is actually still provided by your local phone company, but instead of the Internet connection also being provided by them, it's provided by the third party DSL company (like Earthlink) who runs a major Internet connection to the phone company's central office. The third party DSL company pays the local company a fixed, regulated rate for the "last mile" DSL connection from the central office to the home.
The local phone company is in effect forced to lease their DSL lines out to other companies at a flat rate, with those companies providing the actual Internet connection. The same thing is done for gas and electricity in lots of places. One company owns the pipes, another (including usually a subsidiary of the company which owns the pipes) provides the content flowing through the pipes. That's why you can buy electricity from a supplier who uses mostly wind generators if you wish. The electricity you get doesn't actually come mostly from wind. But as long as they put as much electricity into the grid as you're paying for, the numbers all balance out in the accounting books.
The reason it hasn't worked so well for DSL is because of ambiguity when a problem occurs. Your DSL service goes down, you call Earthlink. They blame your Verizon phone line. You call Verizon, they blame Earthlink's Internet service. The customer is stuck with non-functional Internet while the company which owns the pipes (Verizon) and the company which provides the content (Earthlink) point fingers at each other. I had to deal with this a lot a former workplace (with a T1 line, whose market works the same way). The only way I could get anything fixed was to get Speakeasy (our T1 Internet provider) to call up Verizon (our phone line provider), and then in a big conference call force them to figure out exactly who is at fault and who should fix it.
Typical Obama policy, a bodge instead of the proper fix for the actual problem.
The right solution would be to get rid of cable boxes entirely by forcing cable companies to provide homes with an unencrypted signal that we can just tune with the tuners already built into our TVs.
1. go eminent domain on the infrastructure that the public paid for via tax loopholes.
2. let any company compete over that infrastructure, with an access fee going back to maintain/upgrade said infrastructure.
3. profit!!!
Right now, content producers own the content distribution means. Better service would come from separating the physical infrastructure from the service. It'd be like MVNOs (one company owns the tower/hardware, other sells access to it).
In the age of Internet video, cable boxes shouldn't exist at all. I've had no major problems with streaming video (that aren't caused by ISPs throttling bandwidth). Computers, tablets, and Apple/Fire TVs all do the same thing.
The problem with copyright is that it is a monopoly on distribution. This should not be the case. It's an artificial construct that has harmed more people than it has benefited. It was created to promote the arts and sciences for the benefit of the people. It has not done that. What it has done is enriched a small minority that are not in most cases the creators. The idea authors and creators can't make money without copyright is ridicules. I made a living for years via distribution of my artist works on the internet without expecting people to respect some artificial creation. Then later I started another business that also takes advantage of copyleft. While copyleft isn't the same thing as copyright it is a hack on it which largely accomplishes the opposite of copyright in that it ensures no one can maintain or create a monopolistic distribution of a work or derivative work.
What we should do if not eliminate the copyright monopoly altogether (possibly with an exception to copyleft as it does the opposite thing) is mandate that a copyright owner can't maintain a monopoly distribution of the work. Rather that they should only be able to charge a fee to any one who does distribute the work. In other words I should be able to setup a web site equivalent to a 1990s era video rental store and stream DVD content that I buy. Renting physical tapes was found to be legal back in the day and so should streaming such content today. We should be eliminating the monopoly on distribution. Copyright owners should not be able to dictate who sells there work, in what formats it is sold, distributed, streamed, etc. Only that each party must pay an equal set royalty to do so regardless of the medium.
Cities (and governments in general) have no incentives to save money and operate cost efficiently because they are not rewarded for that.
By whom? I was under the impression that Republican voters valued a mayor who runs a city like a business.
Correcting errors that you identified in post #51931939:
Cities (and governments in general) have no incentives to save money and operate cost efficiently because they are not rewarded for that.
By whom? I was under the impression that more fiscally conservative voters valued members of city council who run a city like a business.