Bi-directional CableCARD host for Windows?

[richard1980]

Comcast bought NBC Universal (or as they renamed it, NBCUniversal) from GE last year. Time Warner is the owner of Time Warner Cable. Just those two companies own the majority of the content broadcast over the US TV system, and Comcast is the largest cable company in the US, with Time Warner Cable coming in at number 2. The rest of the content is provided by several smaller companies including Disney, News Corp, Viacom, and CBS. The cable companies have a very large influence over those smaller companies. It's in the form of money, just like you said.

[mattiedread]

I asked a senior tech at CableVision about this a few years ago:

Your cable boxes can transmit a signal back to initiate VOD/PPV.. over the exact same line my internet/phone/video is coming through. Why couldn't that signal be generated by a web based app (MCE plugin) and transmitted over the internet? If whatever is receiving that signal now has an ip address it should be relatively easy.

He agreed, thought it would be done in a year or so as CV is always developing web based apps... I just got an email yesterday about a plugin which allows you to double click a phone number on a webpage and it dials your phone, so, they've integrated web and phone. Can't imagine they couldn't process a signal out of the guide, so when you hit one of those OD entries in the guide the signal is sent via the web, and back to MCE via a standard web interface. Media Center pulls my guide from CV's website periodically, why couldn't that be done 'on demand'? Isn't it basically the same thing?

[richard1980]

This concept has been discussed but nothing has actually been done about it. First it was tru2way, then it was AllVid...and today we still have nothing.

And BTW, WMC doesn't get its guide data from CV's website. WMC downloads the guide data from Microsoft. Zap2it gives it to Microsoft.

[barnabas1969]

Everything I've read about Tru2Way and Allvid tells me that the cable companies are reluctant to change anything because they would rather continue to rent you a crappy piece of hardware for WAY MORE than it is worth. They want to protect their VOD income, and also continue to get box rental fees. Basically... they want their cake, and they want to eat it too.

I've honestly not missed the VOD stuff since I went to Media Center. With Hulu and Netflix, I get everything I want anyway. My base cable bill went DOWN by $20/month, and I added whole-house DVR functionality at the same time! And... that's just my BASE BILL. When you consider that I'm no longer paying $4.99 for each HD movie, it adds up to even more money. The cable companies are stupid for not working to add a way for CableCARD devices to receive VOD content. They would make more money if they allowed it to happen.

[adam1991]

They can protect their VOD income by offering a MC plugin for that. Remember, their boxes generally run on the vendor's software, so the cableco shouldn't care.

But yes, with MC I don't need the VOD stuff at all.

[richard1980]

How would that protect their income? If you are using WMC, you probably aren't paying them $10 per month for a box. VOD is one of the incentives to pay them $10 per month for their crappy box.

[barnabas1969]

How would that protect their income? If you are using WMC, you probably aren't paying them $10 per month for a box. VOD is one of the incentives to pay them $10 per month for their crappy box.

Well, if they had a way for us to buy their VOD content without using their crappy box, maybe some folks would watch VOD content and pay them some money for the privilege. I know that I was paying more for VOD stuff some months than I paid for the box. It's the laziness factor... you don't have to get up off the couch to go rent a DVD. If you see the movie you want for $4.99 and don't have to get up off your lazy butt, you might actually pay for that service.

Of course, we have Vudu for that.

[slowbiscuit]

Everything I've read about Tru2Way and Allvid tells me that the cable companies are reluctant to change anything because they would rather continue to rent you a crappy piece of hardware for WAY MORE than it is worth. They want to protect their VOD income, and also continue to get box rental fees. Basically... they want their cake, and they want to eat it too.

The cableCos claim that they don't make any money on box rentals and would be happy to get rid of them, but then do everything they can to make third-party boxes a pain in the butt to use (i.e. Cablecard and the silly tuning adapters on some systems). They really want to control the user experience more than anything, and that means not allowing you to delete channels you don't get from the guide, ads in the guide, and pitches for PPV and VOD. That's why Tru2Way failed - they wanted to force Tivo et al to run their UI in exchange for full two-way features, and Tivo told them to pound sand.

AllVid is the last hope IMO, because a full-scale cableCo on the internet is not going to happen.

[richard1980]

The claim that the companies don't make any money on the cable box rental is BS. It takes less than 12 months of rental fees to pay for each box (that is covered in 47 C.F.R. § 76.923, paragraphs F and G). For a company the size of Comcast, it's easy for STBs to account for $1-2 billion in revenue per year, and a significant portion of that is profit if the boxes stay deployed for more than a year (in fact, most of the monthly fee becomes profit).

[barnabas1969]

I can tell you that I had the same cable box for 7 years before I went to Windows Media Center. I'm sure the cable company made money from my box.