Independence Day For Cable TV Subscribers

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Here’s a cool bit of tech / Independence Day news…the Federal Trade Commission has set cable TV subscribers free from having to rent set top boxes from their local cable companies. Nice!

July 1 is the real Independence Day for 65 million cable TV subscribers in the U.S. As of that date, says the Federal Communications Commission, they are free of the tyranny of being forced to rent miserable set-top boxes from their cable companies. Eventually, this declaration of independence could bring dramatic change to the way we get and watch television programming.
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/waits for CableCard pci device to drop in HTPC.... in a few years.... or maybe never....
 
does this mean we can actually buy TiVOs that work on Comcast's network without having to use their crap DVR?
 
I guess this goes hand in hand with the cable card thing. Very cool, now if your cable provider only offers crappy or locked-down boxes you can use a better model from someplace else.
 
/me waits for cable company to implement "cable card rental fee". :mad:
 
great, just the excuse they need to raise the cost of other "services"
 
As long as CableCards remain buggy and unreliable this means nothing.

The CableCard system is a joke. CableLabs "certified" devices rarely work on all cable systems that support CabelCard. Cable operators often push down firmware to their CableCards that break their users and require service, where the tech tells them everything would "just work" with a STB.

The vable operators have zero incentive to make this work better. I am convinced they have engineered the whole thing to be such a huge PITA as to driver users to rent their (very lucartive, yet super crappy) STB.

So: BFD to this news.
 
Let's see...if you break down the typical Set-top box, you probably have about $100 worth of hardware, $150 if it's also a DVR. Yet they rent it to you at $15 / month. Me thinks being able to buy or build your own Set Top Box is a good thing. Remember when you used to have to rent your phones? Same idea, apply it to cable TV. Ironically, cable companies profit from the whole phone rental thing since customers are able to buy their own phones and use them on any phone system in the US.
 
TiVo series3's already have two cablecard slots, and you can buy vista MCE machines with cablecard too. They work fine, I have a S3 myself and love it. Problem is that they're unidirectional, which means that:

1) You can't get PPV or VOD services. I can live with this.
2) As cable companies move to switched digital video, these devices won't get any of the channels. How can this be, you ask, when the cable companies are forced to use cablecards themselves? It's due to an application layer called OCAP, which allows them to embed bidirectional functionality in the software and still support cablecards. Why can't TiVo and vista MCE support that same functionality? Well, they can, but the cable companies aren't mandated by law to allow them to, so they won't.

In other words, this whole thing is total bullshit. It won't lead to any additional choices for the customers, and even worse, the new set top boxes with cablecard cost more to produce, which the cable companies will happily pass along to you.
 
lol@this being called an "Independence Day"

Think about it...do you see any awesome Fourth of July fire sales going on at Best Buy/Circuit City/etc, advertising these brand-spankin' new cable boxes?

More to the point; Can you run two-way services on your Series 3 TiVo with the M-card slot, yet?

No. But you know what has happened? Your local cable company now has to stop purchasing the regular cable boxes, and purchase ones with cable card slots. This means they're paying for brand new boxes PLUS brand-spankin' new multi-stream cable cards that (at least as far as I know in my division) haven't had any real hardcore testing, so the stuff that used to work with the regular cable boxes will still work. On top of that, you have to understand that before July 1st, single-stream cable cards were readily available....and they sucked fairly hard. I can only imagine the nightmares that the new m-cards are going to induce.

All my ranting aside, I'm all for consumer innovation - this is not that siren song, however. Had the FCC been able to keep the current environment, but force the cable companies to hurry up their progress on DCAS, that would have been ideal - that's the direction that the cable companies are moving towards, and also the direction that the consumer electronics market is moving towards.

The only products that I can name off the top of my head that have cablecard slots (and can actively use them) are the high-end HDTVs (possibly not - I just did a quick skim of Bestbuy.com, and their most expensive LCD TV didn't have a cablecard slot listed - that leaves old HDTVs), and the TiVo series 3 boxes. This is just going to force ugly technology on people when DCAS is (hopefully) just around the corner.
 
DCAS isn't around the corner. It hasn't even been solidified as a standard yet, and without a FCC kick in the butt, it never will. Also it requires OCAP, which means that all of those cable boxes you envision consumers buying at best buy will have the same crappy interface and features as the old cable boxes, leaving no room for innovation without the cable company's direct involvement, which they won't give. It's not the solution.
 
Buckus said:
Let's see...if you break down the typical Set-top box, you probably have about $100 worth of hardware, $150 if it's also a DVR. Yet they rent it to you at $15 / month. Me thinks being able to buy or build your own Set Top Box is a good thing. Remember when you used to have to rent your phones? Same idea, apply it to cable TV. Ironically, cable companies profit from the whole phone rental thing since customers are able to buy their own phones and use them on any phone system in the US.
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DVR Boxes cost a lot more than that and they aren't manufactured by the cable companies... Especially if your talking about a HD DVR... Remember TiVo launched their HD recording box for a cheap and mere $800 MSRP *cough cough*
 
maybe it will inally allow me to dump my crapulent scientific atlanta box that Comcast has stalled on replacing with their motoral or god forbid their upcoming tivo upgrade since they bought out my ex-time warner area.

then again this thing became a mandate 11 years ago, so i doubt anything is going to be happening any sooner with this than Comcast getting off their lazy ass.
 
The stance the author of that article has is not only humorous, but it's the stance of someone that hates the cable industry. I wonder if he works for a phone company....?


I work for a cable company and I can tell you that the stance of at least my company is that they want to get out of the converter box rental market as quickly as possible. The $5 a month they charge for rentel barely covers the expense of buying, storing and reconditioning them. I'm sure they aren't loosing anything on them but they don't make as much as people think they do.

They would like nothing more than to hand you a shiny new CC and have you call the manufacturer of the box everytime you have technical difficulty with it...
 
Only $5/month rental fee? I just got another cable box, and its $15/month rental. Complete ripoff.
 
Unfortunately this means nothing. You have to rent the cable card its self, everyone is waiting on that darned 2.0 spec I believe, its supposed to be a two way conversation and without that you can't get pay per view/on demand or whatever. The cable companies have already seen fit it things missing or never working right besides the fact that you may have to pay a hefty fee for installation. Don't get me started on HD, there was a post maybe two months ago about it that shows you the dismal fate we face.
 
valve1138 said:
Along with a nice fat service charge to install it.
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Exactly. Instead of charging you $5 a month for the STB, they will charge you $5 a month for the cable card and you can buy your own STB that the cable card may or may not work with. My 3 year old TV has a cable card slot and I prefer to not get one because once I put a cable card in it I can't scan for channels anymore (and watch ones they don't encrypt).

I don't see any independence over this... They cable company is still going to screw you...
 
OvrrDrive said:
The stance the author of that article has is not only humorous, but it's the stance of someone that hates the cable industry.
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What, you mean a consumer? Because everybody hates their cable company.
 
Does TiVo still charge a monthly fee for the privilege of using the box you already paid for? My cable company charges me $5/month for their box. When I was looking at TiVo boxes a few years ago I remember there was a $10 monthly fee on top of the price of the box. Cable company box sounded like a better deal to me at the time.
 
Yes, TiVo is much, much more expensive. It's also much, much better. I don't regret buying my S3 one bit, and I paid nearly full price when they first came out.
 
Amen,brother. For me it's Cox. Service is ok, but the SA300HD box is pathetic.

They fixed many of the missing features/bugs in the latest software release, but now the hardware can't keep up.

I want Tivo!



Terminus said:
does this mean we can actually buy TiVOs that work on Comcast's network without having to use their crap DVR?
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