[opendtv] Re: How Big Cable killed the open set-top box-and what to do about it
- From: Craig Birkmaier <craig@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 25 Jul 2012 09:45:05 -0400
At 4:57 PM -0500 7/24/12, Manfredi, Albert E wrote:
This would be pretty decent. You have a box at the point of cable
entry into the house, and then from there on, all sets in the house
would be seeing clearQAM. And the box could decrypt all of the
channels that household signed up for.
Right idea, but wrong RF cloud.
What you want from the gateway is MPEG-2 transport streams delivered
over WiFi. Requiring a Quam decoding capability in every third party
device is not going to happen. And even MPEG-2 encoding is
problematic, as most of today's new screens DO NOT support MPEG-2.
While I am not supportive of the notion that you need an MVPD
subscription to download "protected" content from the Internet, the
cable companies are actually providing an appropriate bypass
mechanism for subscribers. You simply connect via broadband to
servers that have the content in the best format for each device.
An alternative would be for the gateway device to have MPEG-2 to
h.264 transcoding feeding a WiFi node for the home.
You can go much further if the cable system switches over to all IP
streams, *or* if cable systems design cable boxes that convert
incoming TV channels into standard IP streams. Then you can leverage
the full IP suite to do any kind of EPG scheme and interactivity
your hearth desires.
This is going to happen. The real issue here is still what is inside
those transport streams. It is likely that the cable companies may
move to h.264 as they migrate to IP simply for efficiency reasons.
The problem is, it makes too much good sense. MVPDs much prefer
forcing people to add unnecessary rental hardware in front of each
one of their TV sets, not to mention rental or in-system PVRs.
The FCC has TOTALLY dropped the ball on this one - I would even go so
far as to say this is mostly intentional, not a lack of understand as
the article suggested. many of us spend time at the FCC in the early
'90s educating them on all of this. This was going on in parallel
with the development of the U.S. DTV standard, and we provided great
detail about how to build an interoperable infrastructure that would
allow a real marketplace to develop.
Unfortunately, the FCC seems more interested in protecting the
industries it is regulating rather than the customers they are
supposed to be looking out for.
Regards
Craig
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