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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.
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 ?
We cut our Verizon bill by about 50$/mo by switching out the five Verizon boxes for a bunch of TiVo boxes. All we needed from Verizon was one cable card (which we still pay something like 3$/mo for).
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.
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