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FCC Delays Cable TV Apps Vote, Needs Time To Work Out Licensing (arstechnica.com)
The FCC has delayed a vote on a plan that would require pay-TV operators to make free TV applications, so cable subscribers will have to wait longer for an alternative to renting set-top boxes from cable companies. ArsTechnica reports:The FCC was scheduled to vote on final rules at its monthly meeting today, but the item was removed from the agenda just before the meeting began. The commission's Democratic majority still seems determined to issue new rules, but there have been objections from the cable industry and disagreements among Democratic commissioners over some of the details. "We have made tremendous progress -- and we share the goal of creating a more innovative and inexpensive market for these consumer devices," Chairman Tom Wheeler and fellow Democrats Mignon Clyburn and Jessica Rosenworcel said today in a joint statement. "We are still working to resolve the remaining technical and legal issues and we are committed to unlocking the set-top box for consumers across this country." The vote could happen at next month's meeting, but the commissioners did not promise any specific timeline.
Sperm bank is an app, Free TV app, enough with apps already.
Seriously, I don't understand what TFS is about!
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
This is a waste of time and effort. Cable TV is not a need, it's a luxury service, and it's quickly becoming obsolete anyway. Internet service is a real *need* in modern society, just like other telecom services and electricity, but cable TV is not like this, it's purely for entertainment. Let the cablecos treat their TV customers however they want, and focus regulation on ISPs (which also happen to be cablecos in many cases).
Why should I care if Rolls-Royce, Coach, or DeBeers were screwing over their customers?
force ISP to let your own hardware or may it part of the base rate.
Comcast business class with static ip forces you to rent with an fee on top of the static ip fee.
ATT forces you to rent their gateway.
Now with app based tv the ISP can say for security we must own the gateway and we want the gateway to do all.
Mine seems to be working great in my Tivo.
"Don't teach a man to fish, feed yourself. He's a grown man. Fishing's not that hard." - Ron Swanson
I understand the reservations, and on a certain level I agree with you.
However, cable companies don't really work like the rest of the free-market economy.
1) You have local monopolies. There is no normal invisible-hand working to help the consumer vote with their business. Sure, there are alternatives popping up in recent years, but no true direct competitor. Monopolies have to be governed to prevent abuses.
2) They could become crucial information disseminators in times of invasion, natural disaster, or other emergency. Government has a vested interest in being able to reach the population in times of emergency.
3) It's something people care about so, right or wrong, government feels it has to be involved. Government regulates all sorts of stuff. That's what they do, they govern. Depending on your individual political outlook you might want them governing less or more, but governing stuff is what they're all about.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
The previous plan to require the cable companies to support a software-only cable card was better. That would allow TVs and set-top boxes to be built with native cable support--you would just need to do some configuring. It would use the same encrypted QAM signal that is coming in over the coax.
The app approach can be helpful, but it involves streaming the channels over the Internet instead of using the QAM signal that is already being sent. This has a number of downsides. Streamed video may be more highly compressed. It may be subject to dropped packets. Streaming may be subject to WiFi interference in places where coax already runs to the TV.
Another advantage of the virtual cable card is that cable cards allow for recording. I know people are shifting to streaming on demand as the most popular option, but many of us like to record on DVRs. I love my MythTV, and many people love their TiVos.
And then there's the privacy issue. How many times have I heard people complain about smart TVs sending data back to corporate servers for who-knows-what purpose? With a streaming app, you can't easily block that.
All said, what really makes sense is both. Require both a freely licensed streaming app and a software-only cable card. Prohibit charging a rental fee for cable cards or set-top boxes until they comply with the regulation.
Let's all hope that this ends up not happening. It'd be an extremely minor improvement which only prevents any serious improvement from ever happening.
If the government is going to use force here, then it should be that any interstate commerce in TV must use standards. Why demand a free-as-in-beer app when you can just demand free-as-in-speech specs? That would get us all plenty of free-as-in-beer apps anyway, except that you get as many are needed, until everyone agrees it's competitive enough. Don't like Company X's TV player? Try Company Y's, or this one on githib, or write your own. A week after specs are published, you're going to have way better stuff available than any app Comcast is ever going to make for your Roku, which will be the next thing for you to be constantly bitching about (assuming you're still using the Roku when the app comes out).
If you're not going to force the use of standards, then don't bother using force at all. Why go to so much trouble just to do it wrong? You're setting us up so that when we tire of this next failure, the cable companies will be able to say "but we did what you want! It's not fair to make us change again!"
Protocols and interoperability are what have value. Stop stressing implementations so much. Doing things is fucking trivial, compared to figuring out what to do and being allowed to do it. Freedom gets you diversity, which gets you performance. Does anyone really still pretend to not know this?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I think this may explain why Apple paused its plans to incorporate a life TV service into the Apple TV app... why forge relationships with lots of $$$ if the government could force the cable company to foot the bill entirely and provide free apps ... which you could then just add to your exisitng box and not have to change your business model?
No matter what the FCC decides, the cable companies will eventually find a way to make up a new fee that replaces the lost lease income. For instance, I lease an STB from Dish Network to the tune of about $7/mo. I could buy the exact name model of STB on eBay and send back the leased unit, but to authorize it for use with Dish they would change me a, you guessed it, $7/mo BYOSTB "access fee."
I think what most people would love to have is a Roku with a cable card. The current hardware won't do MPEG-2; otherwise people would pair the Roku with a HD Homerun Prime. The Prime can tune three channels, so you would need one cable card for three Rokus/TVs. If Roku did this, they would crush the set-top box market.
I am a cable card owner and I strongly disagree. Tivo is useless without an expense subscription and it is not PC friendly. Windows Media Center, the only way to record and play back copy-once content on a PC, was abandoned in Windows 10. SiliconDust, makers of the HDHomeRun device I use, are working on a DVR system that is CableCard approved but it has been in development for over a year and it still does not support DRM content. They do have a green android app that can play copy-once content but it is out of date and the new grey app is still waiting to get CableCard approval. Dealing with CableCards is a huge unnecessary pain which is why most non-technical people avoid it and pay set-top box rental fees.
CableCards were mandated by the FCC and without their regulations would not exist at all. CableCard certification, controlled by the cable industry, is intentionally onerous, expensive, and time consuming. How many new CableCard devices have come on the market in the last three years?
While I pay for the cable companies services I should be able to own everything in my house. The cable company certainly doesn't want to own the wiring in my house and they charge a hefty fee to work on it. Many of the copy-once channels already have Internet on-demand services that use built in browser DRM technology and one is free to buy their own cable modem so technology is not a barrier to dumping set-top boxes. There is nothing special about setup boxes except that they are a huge cash cow that the industry has a death grip on. Companies like Microsoft, Google, Sony, and Apply want to build unified entertainment solutions but the telcoms lock them out of the market.
Markets don't exist without competition and the FCC should absolutely open up the TV services to new innovators.
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be-T J