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Sammer
join:2005-12-22
Canonsburg, PA

Sammer to fiberguy2

Member

to fiberguy2

Re: Some issues:

said by fiberguy2:

•The FCC wants more competition in the set top box market: The FCC is pretty clearly annoyed with the industry's (and their own) failure with CableCARDs and starting on page 49 explains how the agency is going to push hard to end proprietary conditional access systems "on or before" December 31, 2012. In other words: they want more consumer choice in broadband-powered set tops that can access the Internet without carrier restrictions. Again, the devil will be in the details and whether TV operators want consumers to have access to their choice of completely open set tops (hint: they don't).
Congress controls copyright and Congress could insist on no encryption of digital cable channels except premiums such as HBO, Showtime, Starz, until this problem is solved. If they did you can bet that a solution would be found in a New York minute.
fiberguy2
My views are my own.
Premium Member
join:2005-05-20

fiberguy2

Premium Member

said by Sammer:

said by fiberguy2:

•The FCC wants more competition in the set top box market: The FCC is pretty clearly annoyed with the industry's (and their own) failure with CableCARDs and starting on page 49 explains how the agency is going to push hard to end proprietary conditional access systems "on or before" December 31, 2012. In other words: they want more consumer choice in broadband-powered set tops that can access the Internet without carrier restrictions. Again, the devil will be in the details and whether TV operators want consumers to have access to their choice of completely open set tops (hint: they don't).
Congress controls copyright and Congress could insist on no encryption of digital cable channels except premiums such as HBO, Showtime, Starz, until this problem is solved. If they did you can bet that a solution would be found in a New York minute.
With the way digital networks work, this wouldn't be a very effective delivery system... non-encrypted satellite based feeds would be a problem becuase:

1) you'd immediately loose any chance of an argument for ala cart.

2) You'd have to separate out Tier 1 and Tier 2 quite a bit in order to trap out Tier 2 digital basic.. and then Tier 3 digital Basic.. and so on.. it would be an incredible mess.. not to mention, changes of service would be expensive as it would always require a truck roll. This would be a major step back in technology.

3) Traps also bleed into other signal frequency.. if they placed, say, other services that you subscribed to in that frequency, that trap on your line would/could interfere with those other services... the more and more they move to complete digital services, the more complicated this would be. Further, when they want to do channel realignments, this would cause a large problem. Also, when networks drop off of the line up, and they want to replace them, it also makes it very difficult.

Just think that this is a bad idea.. a conversion like this is extremely costly and very time intensive.. not to mention, further changes to the systems would be costly which would ultimately drive up costs even more as they happened.

Where they NEED to spend their money is simply working on systems where conditional access is part of the TV itself.. they have to have some addressable control over what the consumer receives in the home.. when it's analogs we're talking about, it's just a completely different story.