It's really easy to lose sight of the intentions of the gov't. This is especially true, when it's been so long since the law was passed by congress that some of us at Engadget were still in grade school. You see, over ten years ago Congress passed the Communications Act of 1996 and one of the many intentions was to free consumers from the hold that cable co's had on them and create an open system -- very much like the way you can bring your own phone to your land line. As you'd expect, big cable has been dragging their feet every step of the way and it doesn't surprise us that they haven't given up yet. And, in the spirit of protecting their business Comcast is suing the FCC for forcing them to deploy cable boxes without integrated security (
CableCARD). You might be asking, "on what grounds?" and the answer is kinda silly. Comcast is upset because these boxes cost more than their old boxes and the FCC issued waivers to smaller cable co's to help lessen the burden -- as if ten years notice wasn't enough time to prepare. On the other hand, we applaud the FCC for standing up to them and have witnessed the benefits first hand, as every cable co' that didn't get a waiver now supports M-Cards that help reduce a TiVo HD owners monthly expenses, while those with waivers are stuck renting two single stream cards.
posted Nov 2nd 2007 3:56PM
Does this mean we can sue Comcast for not playing fair? With their rates that is! I'm sure we ALL know someone in the same county of whatever state we live in that pays more and or less for the exact same non-promotional package....now how is that fair?!?!?!?!?
The cable industry has to be the biggest anti-consumer, anti competitive bunch of a-holes out there. Think of how much Digital Entertainment could progress if we could free ourselves of cable boxes...Media Center PCs would be EASILY HD compatible as a start....
Time warner's new cable card boxes suck, they're full of bugs and I want the old ones back :(
Awesome title -- and oh-so-very true!
Oh man, this behavior is classic Comcast.
I've never really noticed till recently how realistically pro-consumer (and overtly so) the FCC is (or has become). It's pretty awesome.
Nah, let me know when they force Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, et al to resell their fiber infrastructure at wholesale (like the Telecom Act says) and THEN I'll call the FCC pro-consumer.
Seeing how the FCC just ended exclusive apartment contracts, why not go a bit further and threaten to declare cable franchises invalid if CableCard (or future) deadlines are unmet? They drag their feet because they can.
Comcast badly wants to be as fundamentally evil as Verizon, but their management is far too incompetent.
Comcast should sue themselves.
Ben,
Does this mean that I can get an M-card from Comcast to use in my TiVo Series 3 in place of the two Cable Cards, one of which they charge me $4.95 or so each month?
Thanks for the clarification.
-Hugh (from the iPhone line)
I can't wait to see Comcast on the scrapheap of television history. Brian Roberts and his fellow band of crooks make the Sheriff of Nottingham seem charitable in comparison. May a new technology come in and crush them and their wicked accomplices.
That said, now do you economists see one of the biggest problems with economies of scale? You can't keep up with new technology if every change requires you to spend a gazillion dollars to retrofit your whole system. That's a real problem considering what Ray Kurzweil is talking about in his new book "The Singularity is Near."
The best thing the FCC could do is force the breakup of Comcast. They are every bit as pervasive in cable TV as AT&T was in the phone biz in 1985. If they don't break them up, this country's cable TV infrastructure will never progress, and the rest of the world will pass us by like we were standing still.
Multiple people at Comcast have told me that they do not carry M-Cards. Then again, they didn't know the difference between an M-Card and a bi-directional card, so I'm not sure how reliable that information is...
"Ben,
Does this mean that I can get an M-card from Comcast to use in my TiVo Series 3 in place of the two Cable Cards, one of which they charge me $4.95 or so each month?
Thanks for the clarification.
-Hugh (from the iPhone line)"
The Series3 will accept an M-Card but will only use it to decrypt 1 stream. So you'd need 2 M-Cards still.
The TiVoHD can use a single M-Card to decode TWO streams.
Hopefully a Series3 software upgrade will allow the same functionality shortly.