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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."
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 ?