[opendtv] Re: TiVo, media center PC makers alarmed by CableCard-cutting bill
- From: Craig Birkmaier <craig@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: OpenDTV Mail List <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 10 Aug 2013 11:15:42 -0400
I'm in the middle of selling the pcube.com domain to a company in Europe, and
my pcube.com e-mail address is temporarily inoperable (hopefully it will be
working again soon).
In the following message, Bert wrote:
> [opendtv] Re: TiVo, media center PC makers alarmed by CableCard-cutting bill
> • From: "Manfredi, Albert E" <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx>
> • To: "opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> • Date: Tue, 6 Aug 2013 20:07:28 +0000
>
>
>
> The comments that accompanied that article showed that many people are awake.
> Sometimes I have my doubts. It's almost comical to read the excuses by the
> cable industry as to why they should be allowed to be totally walled in, and
> then to make it sound like they're doing everyone a favor.
Yes, there was a wide range of comments to this story, with the expected rage
and diversity in points of view.
Key in this is the fact that there is broad consensus that cable card sucks,
and that the cable industry never really liked having to support it. Less
evident is the reality that software based verification schemes are now well
evolved and use routinely by everyone, INCLUDING the cable industry. Perhaps
there is more to this bill than meets the eye: the FCC has never been able to
get out in front of this issue and provides NO leadership.
With all of the noise about Intel, Samsung, Microsoft and others developing
products that will work with cable systems, the security issue is clearly in
play. I would not expect ANY of these potential new products to use cable card;
I WOULD expect them to use some form of software based conditional access.
Bert continued:
> Quelle surprise! And that parenthetical comment is, like, DUH!
>
> Always amazes me to see Congressmen so blatantly and overtly on the take.
Really?
From where you live and work you can see it in plain sight every day!
There are reasons why these corporations spend billions to influence our
elected officials, and increasingly we see evidence that the government can
strike back at corporations that do not play the political patronage game.
Remember back in the '90s when Microsoft did not spend a dime to influence the
Washington (D.C.) politicians? They soon learned the value of having an office
in D.C. and a big budget to protect their interests. Apple is now learning the
same lesson.
> The answer to this, of course, is for consumers to insist on Internet
> distribution of what they want, as consumers have already been doing
> gradually.
> That will obsolete all this anachronistic nonsense. Even CableCard, never
> mind
> those pointless proprietary STBs, won't work well attached to iPads,
> especially
> not when the iPad is outside the home. That's going to be the way out, not
> "the
> successor to CableCard" that we're supposed to be waiting for. The successor
> to
> CableCard is called IPsec.
Consumers can ask (insist) for anything they want; this does not mean that they
will get what they want. The ONLY way that consumers could influence the sea
change that you so eloquently support would be to cancel their MVPD
subscriptions en mass. Unfortunately, the MVPDs seem to be holding their own,
and are actually using the Internet to deliver content to device like iPADs,
without any need for cable card.
This suggests, that if they are willing to support second screen devices with
relatively low grade software conditional access, they may be gutting ready to
do the same for third party devices that will connect to their secure MPEG
transport stream networks.
It is even possible that the bill discussed in the article is intended to
eliminate the very clumsy and ineffective cable card standard, to make way for
LESS walled in MVPD networks…
Regards
Craig
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