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Hollywood wants to own your outputs (and that’s a good idea)
We like to encourage debate in hot topics in tech policy and law. This week, we’re focusing on Selectable Output Control, which Hollywood and the cable industry are both pushing hard for at the FCC. We invited Kyle McSlarrow, head of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (cable’s trade and lobbying group in Washington) to take his best shot at convincing Ars readers of the virtue, wonder, and necessity of SOC.
Continue reading »Cable: Let us lock down your TV (we’ll offer movies sooner)
The movie studio crusade to take over your home theater system just got an endorsement from Time Warner Cable, whose top staff visited the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) last Wednesday to ask, yet again, for permission to let cable operators limit video streams to HDTVs and DVRs. At the meeting, representatives of TWC and the National Cable and Telecommunications Association (NCTA) backed the scheme being pushed by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA): Hollywood would send movies to cable before they appear on DVD, but the cable operators would clamp down on some of the features found in their subscribers’ TV systems. Specifically, consumers wouldn’t be able to receive these flicks from an analog connection, which the studios say is more susceptible to piracy than a digital stream.
Continue reading »Loving cable, hating cable companies
Here’s the paradox: cable companies are roundly despised in the US, saddled with the sort of scorn generally reserved for lawyers, politicians, and the recording industry. But the services that those cable companies provide are well-loved. Indeed, despite years of price-gouging and customer service so atrocious that techs sometime fall asleep on people’s couches , Americans love themselves some cable TV, and in fact are watching more hours of the boob tube than ever before in history.
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