TV Everywhere: Collusion Anywhere?: Via Freedom to Tinker.
FreePress and the National Cable and Telecom Association (NCTA) are talking past each other about TV Everywhere, a new initiative from the cable TV industry. FreePress says TV Everywhere is the cable industry's collusive attempt to limit competition; the NCTA says it's an exciting new product opportunity for consumers. Let's unpack this issue and see who might have a point, and who is blowing smoke.
We're at a critical point in the history of television. In recent years, most people have gotten TV shows from a traditional cable or satellite service. Now more and more people are getting shows on the Internet. Cable companies need to adapt, somehow, or become dinosaurs.
Which brings us to TV Everywhere. The idea, according to the NCTA, is for cable companies to offer their residential subscribers online access to the same shows they get at home. Existing consumers get more, at no extra charge -- who would complain about that? -- but only if they keep buying traditional cable service.
FreePress tells a different story, in which cable industry companies have agreed among themselves that this is their sole Internet distribution strategy. If such an agreement exists, it is problematic -- it looks like a classic market division agreement, which is bad for consumers and (as I understand it) presumptively illegal. read more... »
Satellite TV to FCC: we're special, don't make us open up: Via Law & Disorder Section - Ars Technica.
If you've tried to pump your fully-paid-up cable connection into, say, a computer running Windows Media Center, you've probably come up against the closed nature of pay-TV and the severe limitations of CableCARD. And what about satellite TV? Don't even think about it.
The FCC wants to blow open the market for third-party video devices, scrapping some of the current (failed) CableCARD rules and adding satellite providers to the list. read more... »
Cable: Let us lock down your TV (we'll offer movies sooner): Via Law & Disorder Section - Ars Technica.
The movie studio crusade to take over your home theater system just got an endorsement from Time Warner Cable, whose top staff visited the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) last Wednesday to ask, yet again, for permission to let cable operators limit video streams to HDTVs and DVRs. At the meeting, representatives of TWC and the National Cable and Telecommunications Association (NCTA) backed the scheme being pushed by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA): read more... »
Broadcast flag rears vile head, bars viewer from recording: Via Law & Disorder Section - Ars Technica.
Irony alert: Sons of Anarchy gets broadcast flag. read more... »
Supreme Court Serves Up Remote-Recording Victory: Via Threat Level.
The Supreme Court on Monday let stand a copyright case testing whether cable operators may permit customers to store television programming on company servers to be viewed at a later time.
The issue concerns an August ruling by a federal appeals court, which lifted (.pdf) an injunction against Cablevision Systems blocking it from offering customers a recording service that stores programming on the cable company’s own servers instead of on viewers’ in-house playback devices.
Hollywood and television programmers maintained Cablevision’s service directly infringes their exclusive rights to both reproduce and publicly perform their copyrighted works. read more... »
Digital Television begins today - 6/13/09: Via New York News and Tri-State News - 7online.com.
NEW YORK (WABC) -- TV shows were replaced by the hiss of static in perhaps 1 million U.S. homes Friday as stations ended their analog broadcasts and abandoned the transmission technology in use since the days of Milton Berle, Sid Caesar and Howdy Doody.
Channel 7 turned off its analog signal and switched to digital at 12:30 p.m. following Eyewitness News at Noon. read more... »
TiVo, AppleTV, Boxee, and the future of HD television delivery: Via Freedom to Tinker
I don't watch as much TV as I once did. Yet, I'm still paying Comcast every month, as they're the only provider who will sell me HD service compatible with my TiVo-HD. Sadly, Comcast is far from ideal. I'm regularly frustrated at their inability to debug their signal quality problems. (My ABC-HD and PBS-HD signals are right on the edge, in terms of signal quality, so any slight degradation makes those channels unwatchable through the MPEG block errors, which seems to happen on an irregular basis.) Comcast customer service wants me to sit around all day waiting for a tech to come out when the problem has nothing whatsoever to do with my house. When I've attempted to report the signal strength measurements I've taken and how they vary from channel to channel, I've found I might as well be speaking to a brick wall.
Yes, I know I could put an old-school antenna on the roof and feed it into my TiVo. That would do pretty good for the local channels, but then why am I paying Comcast at all? Answer: for the handful of shows that we watch from cable channels. More than one person has asked me why I don't just download these shows online and cut the cable. You can get Comedy Central programming from their web site. You can get all sorts of things from Hulu.com. All free and legal! read more... »
Most Hackable Coupon-Eligible DTV Converter?: Via Slashdot
An anonymous reader writes "So I've finally gotten my DTV coupons, now I have to choose a converter before the analog signals go dark. I'd like to get one that is hackable, but haven't had much luck finding information about the internals of the units available. My question is, What chipsets do the different coupon eligible converters use, and which one is the most hackable? It'd be great to be able to send my own MPEG stream and have it displayed, or to grab the raw stream out of the device."
Read Original Article ( Via Slashdot. )
Comcast sued for not selling set-top boxes, CableCARDs: Via Law & Disorder Section - Ars Technica
Cheryl Corralejo is mad at hell at Comcast, and she isn't going to take it anymore. The object of her righteous crusade? Cable box rentals. Corralejo wants to own her box outright, and she has filed a class action complaint on behalf of all other Californians who desperately want to stop paying monthly fees just for a bit of decryption equipment.
The case, filed in federal court in California, began in late November and was recently unearthed by Multichannel News. Comcast has yet to respond.
The gist of the case, according to a copy of the complaint seen by Ars Technica, is rental fees. Corralejo argues that Comcast has a monopoly over video service in her area and that it uses that monopoly power to force her to use decryption equipment, which Corralejo cannot purchase outright. After only a few months, alleges the complaint, end users have already paid Comcast more than the box is worth. read more... »
Missouri HD Owners Waiting For Cable Boxes: Via TVPredictions.com Forum
Missouri HD Owners Waiting For Cable Boxes Cable op Mediacom is two months late for some homes.By SwanniWashington, D.C. (December 3, 2008) -- You've purchased a new High-Definition TV and now you want to watch some of the great high-def programming available from your local cable provider. Right?Well, not so fast if you're a resident of Springfield, Missouri. KSPR-TV, the ABC affiliate in Springfield, reports that roughly 200 people there are on a waiting list to get a high-def set-top from Mediacom, the local cable TV service.In fact, some HDTV owners have been waiting as long as two months. read more... »