Cable Companies Pledge Industry-Wide Commitment But Want Control Over UI (arstechnica.com)

The FCC proposed rules to force pay-TV providers to make video programming -- and the right to record video -- available to the makers of third-party apps and devices. Under this model, third-party app and equipment makers would be able to create their own interfaces through which cable TV subscribers could access their programming. On Thursday, cable companies noted that they still cannot fully comply with FCC's attempt to open up the set-top box market, but have resigned themselves to accepting some form of regulation. From an Ars Technica report: Cable companies still aren't giving up on the apps approach, but now they say they would agree to rules that make it mandatory for large operators to build apps providing access to all the video customers subscribe to on a wide range of devices. Pay-TV companies with at least 1 million subscribers would have to follow the mandate. Industry representatives told the FCC that they are open to the commission "enforcing an industry-wide commitment to develop and deploy video 'apps' that all large MVPDs [multichannel video programming distributors] would build to open HTML5 Web standards," they said in an ex parte filing released today. The filing describes meetings with FCC officials involving the cable industry's top lobbyist, National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) CEO Michael Powell, representatives of Comcast and AT&T/DirecTV, and reps from cable networks Vme TV, Revolt TV, and TV One.

Comments

Why? To prevent you from skipping ads

[denis-The-menace]

meanwhile, they are horrible at designing UI.
-Inconsistent UI
-un-intuitive UI
-too many buttons needed to control the UI

Re:Why? To prevent you from skipping ads

[omnichad]

And the hardware is generally so underpowered that the UI latency is painful.

Re:Uh-oh

[The New Guy 2.0]

Really, a lot of compression can be done to graphical displays on television... the CNBC Ticker is an example. Rather than bloat the satellite signal with a ticker that is quickly getting outdated, they can send the ticker as a bunch of compressible letters and numbers, and then reassemble the ticker at the cable headend.

I wonder why they resist this

[goombah99]

I don't quite see why they have to be forced to do this. It would be better if they didn't have to do it by regulation. Isn't there an advantage to making their services more customizable and accessible by third party apps? Are they affraid of things like slignbox or soemthing?

Re:I wonder why they resist this

[Captain Splendid]

I wonder why they resist this

Competition is detrimental to profit margins.

Re:I wonder why they resist this

[suutar]

No, there's a disadvantage because they won't be able to charge set top box rentals if customers can get a box from somewhere else.

Re:I wonder why they resist this

[omnichad]

Because it's the Internet and what I do with the pipes I pay for is my business. If the ISP has undersold their bandwidth, that's not the fault of the neighbor and their legitimate use of the Internet.

Re:I wonder why they resist this

[UnknowingFool]

I don't quite see why they have to be forced to do this. It would be better if they didn't have to do it by regulation.

I rarely find monopolies like cable companies have little incentive to innovate when they can force customers to rent their to use antiquated boxes at $10 per month. From what I know the companies are milking the boxes for every penny of rental fee they can.

Let's talk about quality in my personal example. My box hasn't changed in 6 or 7 years and it was old when I got it. It's painful to navigate. Clicking a button could take a few seconds for the box to respond. I've asked for newer box which I cannot get unless I want to get a bigger package.

Let's talk about changes designed to screw over customers: For example in my area Time Warner offered basic analog cable (40 channels) for under $50 a month. Then they switched from analog to all digital (SDV). In the conversion, they made my digital TV basically useless without a digital adapter which I have to rent for $3/month. They said it was to save bandwidth as moving to switched digital video (SDV) means that they no longer have to broadcast 300+ channels at once but instead only channels being watched need to be sent. However, I didn't magically get 1080p for all those channels: No I still get 480p which is down-converted from HD. Can I buy the adapter (which should cost $10 total)? No. Do I get more channels? No if anything I have fewer channels than I did before. So I have to pay $3 more a month for the less. For 1080p, I have to get the "digital package" for $50 more a month for channels I didn't want and rent the more expensive $10 per box TV.

Re:I wonder why they resist this

[farble1670]

XFinity X1 really is way nicer than most of the alternatives

The alternatives must be really, really bad. X1 is an example of an overly-flowery interface running on inadequate hardware. 300-500ms to react to a touch in my remote isn't acceptable.

People use this crap?

[slk]

A TV is a monitor into which you plug your Chromecast / Roku / Apple TV / Media PC and stream stuff. The whole "Cable company DVR" / "Smart TV" / etc is just a pile of legacy mess that will go the way of the dodo bird, Microsoft Bob, and (hopefully) vendor Android skins.

Re:Moot

[omnichad]

Online video news is distributed per-story, not in half hour episodes. I assure you that there's a lot more content providers out there. What the Internet lacks in better curation, it makes up for in convenience.

Re:Uh-oh

[drinkypoo]

That's always going to cost more though, and you can bet they want to be producing set top boxes for the lowest possible price.

Now that cellphone SoCs and GPUs are powerful enough, I'd think that they'd be thinking about using them for the next generation. Just making the hardware smaller makes it cheaper, once someone else is already paying for the miniaturization.