Who’s In Charge Of Your TV?
by Rich Fiscus on August 15th, 2008
It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that people don’t like the cable company. Whether it’s a big player like Comcast or Time Warner or one of the numerous smaller companies, you probably don’t know a cable subscriber who thinks his provider treats him fairly. There are any number of reasons they’re so universally disliked. Although some complaints are clearly ridiculous, others are completely justified. Perhaps no complaint is more reasonable than the way the control they have over the technology behind their service.
Supposedly that was going to be changing. In the 1990s the FCC received a mandate from Congress to stimulate competition for cable STB’s (Set Top Boxes). That eventually led to the creation of CableCARD, a flawed technology that allowed consumer electronics manufacturers to create their own boxes which could work with cable signals. CableCARD technology was interesting, but ultimately flawed. Its usefulness was limited by a lack of support for interactive services like Video On Demand.
Now the cable and consumer electronics companies have embraced an add-on to CableCARD called Tru2Way. It promises to fix the interactivity issues, and allow unprecedented access to the cable system. The problem is that cable companies still have too much control.
For starters, they have so far been able to resist working with competing technology like Verizon’s FiOS on developing open standards. Incumbent cable companies are like the leaders in any market. They object to a real free market because competition makes it easier for others to compete with them.
Verizon has pointed this out in a letter to the FCC. Although they praise Tru2Way as a good idea, they quite correctly point out that a proprietary solution does more harm than good to consumers. Making consumer electronics compatible with cable systems, while leaving other services out in the cold certainly seems to provide an unfair competitive advantage.
If you’re asking what’s wrong with the cable industry protecting their business, consider the situation of people who use media center PCs instead of old-fashioned consumer electronics to watch TV. Despite the supposed openness, only Microsoft has managed to get a license to make their software work with CableCARD. if they were using an open standard like TCP/IP and Ethernet, which is what Verizon is asking for, it would show what an arbitrary, and ultimately anti-competitive decision this is.
They also would’t be able to shut out competition from Verizon, who would be able to design their service to be compatible with the same hardware built into TVs and DVRs for CableCARD and Tru2Way. Don’t get me wrong. The free market is not only good; it’s necessary. But the free market isn’t free if you let the top company control it. Without competition you don’t have capitalism.
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