I was hoping to
upgrade to an HDTV this holiday season, and apparently I’m not alone,
with HDTV at the top of Americans Christmas wish lists this
year.
As an analogue cable subscriber, before I buy-in,
I’ve been considering the freedom that
“going digital”
should give me compared to the old analog world.
The primary reason I
haven’t “upgraded” to digital cable up to
this point comes down to
TiVo, it and the freedom that devices like it that connect to an analogue
coax cable give me.
Digital technology is supposed to deliver more, not
less freedom, isn’t it? It’s not clear that
upgrading to digital cable
gives me the freedoms I’m used to.
Diving into the digital cable world looks to be a kludge of
coax,
daisy-chained set-top boxes (STBs), and IR repeaters.
Luring Me In To Digital
I’ve
resisted—even when my cable provider was so bold as to remove
programming away from my analog line-up to lure me into digital.
Digital satellite television can be just as
bad—you’re generally tied
into the provider’s hardware.
I’ve even considered foregoing cable
altogether, throwing up an antenna, buying a device like an AppleTV to
download shows via iTunes over the Internet just to avoid this mess,
but I’m not sure my TV watching habits could adjust to the
lack of
mindless channel-surfing.
Some might say, well, just take the plunge, lots of people are
using
3rd party devices like TiVo with digital cable providers.
The problem
is, there doesn’t seem to be a guarantee that the cable
provider won’t
somehow disable the connection.
For example, up in New England, some
cable subscribers that have to kludge
together a STB to their TiVo via a serial cable just to get
the channels to change in unison have
had the rug pulled out from under them by an (arbitrary?)
software update to the STB by the cable provider.
CableCARD
Well that’s okay, CableCARD fixes that.
It was supposed to, but
those who have bought-in are receiving letters from their cable
providers saying those devices will be rendered useless as the cable
provider upgrades its network to
switch
digital and more bandwidth conserving technologies (and we
now know it
needs the bandwidth).
And what’s the cable providers’ solution?
Back to the kludge: the
subscriber’s 3rd party devices will need to somehow attach to
a STB to
continue to receive programming.
And who knows if those STBs will
continue to function, as the New Englanders are finding out the hard
way?
The thing is, a user has to be pretty dedicated to want to go
through all of this trouble to get their cool 3rd party device to work
on the closed and often-changing cable network.
Incentives
The cable providers
know this, and further, have a financial incentive to prevent TiVo-like
devices from working. That incentive comes from a number of sources and
revenue streams:
-
Monthly rental fees for STBs and DVRs;
-
Deriving revenue from on-demand video (both from consumers
and the content providers); and -
Advertisers that embed ads in program guides or other
interactive applications.
Cable has a real financial interest in subscribers using their
boxes—and because of that would far prefer to implement
technologies to
maintain its gatekeeper / monopoly status.
Does Open Mean Open?
Even though it calls its
newer technology “OpenCable,” it’s
“open” in name only. Cable doesn’t
open up its standards for switch digital and other two-way services,
and allow anyone to build to those standards.
Instead, historically its
solution for everything is to drop a closed and proprietary STB between
the network and the innovative 3rd party device, and then even limit
that functionality until consumers give up.
Cable maintains a walled
garden in the realm of content delivery and has slowly been expanding
its reach into technology, by only allowing its own devices to access
all the content it has to offer.
Old AOL
It’s like the old AOL that had private
content you could only access over the Internet with its proprietary
software, instead of a traditional web browser.
AOL gave that model up
when it realized in long run it could make more revenue by being
open.
Of course, AOL had to open up because it had literally
thousands of ISP
competitors and millions of content competitors at the time; cable has
only a handful of competitors, and too often zero in a
consumer’s local
market.
Sticking With Online Sources
3rd party devices compete with cable’s revenue
making STBs and
STB-only content. If you haven’t made the connection with net
neutrality yet, what is the most convenient way to receive content
outside the walled garden?
The Internet—that is, unless cable figures
out a way to limit your access to other online sources. Or
has it already?
And so this holiday season (if I can convince my wife),
I’m going to
do my best to “stay open” and rely on technologies
that deliver and
share content without unreasonable restrictions, and hope that in the
near future cable opens up (or the FCC forces
them to).
Alex Curtis is a contributing author discussing matters relating to the broadband video and IPTV industry. His work can be found on Public Knowledge. Post has Some Rights Reserved.
