However, opposition groups have already turned out in force to protest the proposed rulemaking, which would start a new process created to hash out how a market framework for set-top reform might be implemented.
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“Let’s have the cable company say ‘you want to pay me for my interface, because it does all of these things nobody else does, ‘ rather than ‘you must pay me, ‘ ” Wheeler said.
According to ColorOfChange, its members and supporters delivered more than 28,000 signatures to the Federal Communications Commission calling on the organization to block any Charter and Time-Warner Cable merger.
Under the proposal, a standard setting body would lay out technical specifications for manufacturers.
Commissioner Mignon Clyburn predicted that the proposal would lead to a wider set of options for programming, countering critics’ claims that the proposal would reduce minority-focused choices.
Opponents argue that technology is already fostering new methods of getting programming and those set-top boxes that consumers lease are smarter than predecessors, letting consumers pause and rewind content, record multiple programs at once – and access on-demand content. And he notes it wouldn’t transform your current set-top box into a VCR-like anachronism. He also raised concerns about content theft and other security issues. His goal, Wheeler said, was to use competition to drive down costs and improve the quality of the traditional cable box.
“The application economy is weakening the MVPD video package before our very eyes”, he said.
Implementation of approved rules could take more than three years, he said. She said there was only a paltry number of diverse channels and did not agree that the proposal would adversely affect them, as some minority programmers have asserted. The FCC has said its proposal sets standards and doesn’t specify devices or software.
Set-top box rental fees coast consumers more than $200 annually, Rosenworcel noted, adding that the “clunky set-top box and its many-buttoned remote have not evolved at the same pace” as smartphones. That’s a level of access you don’t even get with streaming-TV services like Amazon, Hulu, and Netflix.
The MPAA also opposes Wheeler’s proposal, which critics say would jeopardize copyright and privacy protections or hobble innovation. The lawmaker and 12 other Democrats said in a letter Tuesday that the FCC should act to give consumers “an alternative to having to rent a set-top box from their pay-TV provider every month”.
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“All we are saying is, ‘Cable operators, you can go ahead and control your product”, he said. Companies have, in fact, been able to build competing set-top boxes for cable (though not satellite) for a decade, but the necessary decoder cards cable companies provide, called CableCARD, were janky in the first years-and they never allowed the two-way communication needed to not just watch TV but order video on demand.
