bus7821
join:2003-08-07
San Pedro, CA
1 edit | reply to fiberguy
Re: CV with a TiVO and a Tuning Adapter... @fiberguy
Every company/industry which has ever bundled products and services together has fought to prevent competition for any part of the package. So far your arguments look like nothing but business as usual.
You cite Tivo’s difficulties with sat companies as evidence of something wrong with Tivo. I have no inside knowledge of the negotiations, but from what I read in the trades I see no evidence of anything but the typical preference for keeping all of the profit from one’s own inferior product over making less from letting an outsider carve out a piece of the pie. Reports suggest that Tivo’s previous management may have driven too hard a bargain over this, but that isn’t a fundamental argument against unbundling. If you have knowledge of something more that was going on here, please specify -- otherwise I don’t think this is much of a point for your case.
SDV is a necessary and logical thing, but I have to wonder if the adapter is artificially kludgy thanks to the actions of the cable industry. Are you willing to claim that it, along with Cablecards and Tru2way are honest efforts to open things up rather than give the illusion of open architecture for dumb regulators? We need look no further than the firewire interface to find an example of a requirement sabotaged by the cable industry (and which failure the industry now tries to spin as proof that the requirement was bogus.)
One point of sympathy that I do have for cable is the interference of the entertainment and broadcast industries in all of this. Even if one genuinely wanted to design an open architecture for a cable system, it would be difficult in the face of pressure from these other industries to keep various parts of it crippled or closed. |
