FCC says it will “unlock the set-top box”

[crossnet]

This could be great news for those of us using NPVR in the US. My service is now going over to scrambled digital, so my tuners will become useless. Don't have any options other than renting cable boxes or buying new cable card tuners. Looking at cutting the cord and going to Broadcast and Internet connections. This may be the answer for me.

Here's a link to the story:

http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/01/...ny-device/

[sub]

A little disclosure - I've been somewhat involved with this. I provided a client that was used to communicate with one of these gateway devices, to receive live tv stream, and metadata. This client was used for FCC demos of the potential technology.

Note, there is still serious DRM involved for copy-protected channels, so may not see the light of day in free / open-source applications.

[pcostanza]

I'm not sure how soon we'd see this anyway. This stuff tends to take ages and the cable industry in the states has a big lobby so just connect the dots. Still, it would be great to see these changes take place.

[BrettB]

A little disclosure - I've been somewhat involved with this. I provided a client that was used to communicate with one of these gateway devices, to receive live tv stream, and metadata. This client was used for FCC demos of the potential technology.

Note, there is still serious DRM involved for copy-protected channels, so may not see the light of day in free / open-source applications.

Yeah! Good for you, sub!

As I was reading about this, I was thinking that DRM could/would still be an issue. But, I think that at least things like free, OTA channels should be mandated to be freely available. And since the intent is to give consumers real, viable, equivalent feature options vs. the providers' set-top boxes, I'm hopeful that at least "general" cable channels (as opposed to "premium" channels like HBO, Showtime, etc.) will be more generally available than they are now in many markets. We'll see...