Cable Industry Still Fighting Kevin Martin's Ghost > Curious

Curious

Personally I don't see it as being fair, but the issue is that if one form of TV provider dominated the industry, it would require some regulation. That is why the 70%-70% findings are so important. It's basically saying that if the cable companies can have such a high proportion of customers as compared to other options, how can it be considered at a disadvantage?

Now if Satellite were to achieve 70%-70% status, it should fall under the same scrutiny from the FCC. Although it is a much more difficult thing to determine how many households could receive satellite TV.

This is really just a federal-backed attack on cable, paid for by telco lobbyists.

My opinion is in part that once the gov'ment gets ahold of something to regulate, it doesn't like to give it up.

Consumer Sat Tech is pretty mature these days... but Telco-TV is still maturing and getting out there. If the Gov'ment decides to regulate cable, I believe it should do so on a pay-tv provider level and not a delivery method level. Currently Telco-TV is limited to basically overbuilds of existing cable areas. Sat Technically has a 100% coverage rate, if you don't factor line-of-sight issues.

There's also the simple fact that should they write the regs such that only "Cable" is regulated, what happens to the cable-co's if they device to the FTTH? Are they no longer subject to that regulation because they no longer a cable-tv provider but instead a IPTV provider via Fiber?

Also, much of the regulation "wish list" we've seen is stuff like ala-carte, which is much more of content provider issue. If they are trying to force changes in the content contracts such to allow customer to ala-carte programming, then that should be something applied across their industry, and not just a forced contract condition on only a subset of their customer's. (cable co's vs sat/telco-tv/hotels/etc etc)

Verizon FiOS uses cable standards and cable equipment, not IPTV. I see no reason why it shouldn't be regulated like a cable company.

In fact, doesn't it have to negotiate cable franchises itself?

reply to jmn1207
all of them coast to coast