Got cable? Then you’ve probably got a cable box that’s costing you a lot of money, at least if you reside in the U.S. In a recent editorial, the New York Times calls for consumers to be able to buy a cable box from any manufacturer—the one-time price could be less than $200, vs. hundreds of dollars per year for “rental” from the cable company.
Reader Mike Dewey writes in to add his own spin on the topic. He writes, “I got a message the other day from Cox, my cable company, telling me that I could no longer connect directly to the cable, that I would need a ‘box’ for every TV. Seems that all of the cable companies lobbied the FCC successfully a couple of years ago to allow them to encode all programs on their cable network, eliminating support for QAM cable signals that are compatible with TV tuners.”
Mike is in southern California, but he found an article at Omaha.com that details the expenses and technical difficulties many Kansans are having, including incompatibilities with customers’ existing DVRs.
Rob Pegoraro in USA Today provides background on this problem, which, he writes, results from “…a decision by the Federal Communications Commission last October to allow cable operators to encrypt all of their signals, including the basic-tier local, public, educational, and government channels that usually flow unscrambled to TVs with the right tuning hardware.”
Writes the Times, “The virtual monopoly that cable companies have over set-top boxes is reminiscent of the way AT&T used to require customers to rent phones from the company and prohibited them from using other devices.”
The good news, the Times reports, is that the FCC is expected to consider new regulations regarding set-top boxes. The bad news is that cable and satellite companies are likely to resist any changes.
Even if the FCC adopts consumer-friendly policies, it won’t solve all the problems related to encryption, equipment, and one-box-per-TV issues. And the Supreme Court has not been kind to pro-consumer initiatives.
