Thoughtcataloges

The FCC Wants to Help You Ditch Your Cable Set-Top Box

My monthly Time Warner Cable bill includes an $11.25-per-month charge for "Set-Top Box & Remote." That's $135 per year for the privilege of having a bulky device take up space under my TV so that I may enjoy all that Bravo and Lifetime have to offer. According to the FCC, 99 percent of U.S. consumers lease a set-top box from their pay TV provider, in large part because of outdated government regulations. But FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler wants to change that, so today he issued a proposal that would allow anyone to create devices or services that compete with traditional set-top boxes, from Apple to Netflix.

"Twenty years ago, Congress mandated that when consumers connect to a pay-TV service they should have the same ability to choose their equipment, just as they do when signing up for phone service," Wheeler wrote in an op-ed posted on Re/code. "The Federal Communications Commission did in fact issue regulations to open the market, but they are woefully out of date and based on 20-year-old technology.

"As a consequence, consumers have limited choices for commercially available set-top boxes, so an overwhelming majority of consumers lease a box from their pay-TV service that doesn't interface well with the wealth of video content online," he continued. "To receive streaming Internet video, it is necessary to have a smart TV, or to watch it on a tablet or laptop computer that, similarly, do not have access to the channels and content that pay-TV subscribers pay for. The result is multiple devices and controllers, constrained program choice and higher costs."

The chairman's proposal would basically open up TV data to innovators so they can create new hardware or software consumers could buy instead of a traditional set-top box; another box or even an app on your tablet, for example. That data includes infomation about programming (channel listing, video-on-demand lineup), entitlements (how that content can be used, like recording), and delivery (the actual content). FCC officials stressed that consumers would not be required to purchase a device; they could continue to use the cable-issued set-top box if they wanted to. But just as the FCC opened up phone competition decades ago by allowing people to use whatever phone they wanted with their landlines, it wants to do the same with video delivery.