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posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday November 10 2015, @12:46AM   Printer-friendly
from the cord-cutters-unite! dept.

The cable box, a crucial part of home theaters for decades, might be on the way out. Casual TV watchers say it's easier to find something to watch through online services such as Netflix and Hulu than it is to flip through hundreds of channels in hopes of finding something interesting. Other viewers complain that the boxes are poorly programmed and difficult to use. Even Congress doesn't particularly like the cable box: Senators Ed Markey (D-MA) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) recently decried the high cost most customers pay to rent one from their provider.

Cable companies are of two minds about this trend. Some, such as Comcast, are trying to find ways to make cable boxes better. Instead of ugly units with clumsy remote controls, they're scrambling to produce sleeker boxes loaded with software that makes it easier to get straight to TV shows and movies.

Are the cable companies missing the forest for the trees?


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  • (Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Tuesday November 10 2015, @01:56AM

    by hemocyanin (186) on Tuesday November 10 2015, @01:56AM (#261029) Journal

    It seems to me that the most boneheaded decision is to broadcast shows on a set schedule. Seriously, why not just present customers with a menu of programs and let them start and stop them on demand obviating the need for DVRs or being in front of your TV at set time to catch a show. A DVR is just a glorified betamax and I'm surprised it has had more longevity than beta.

    Maybe I'm out of touch -- I haven't used broadcast TV or cable since 1992 choosing instead to watch things first on VHS, then DVD, then Netflix DVDs, and now mostly Netflix streaming, sometimes Amazon Prime or Apple TV. I can't comprehend why anyone with access to today's technology (and I live in a rural area of a small town and even I have this access) would subject themselves to living by somebody else's schedule (and endure advertisements to boot) just to watch some shows.

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  • (Score: 1) by Francis on Tuesday November 10 2015, @03:16AM

    by Francis (5544) on Tuesday November 10 2015, @03:16AM (#261046)

    Because you're forced to decide between watching something live and being unable to skip commercials like you used to or you get to skip commercials, but have to watch after the fact.

    • (Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Tuesday November 10 2015, @04:41AM

      by hemocyanin (186) on Tuesday November 10 2015, @04:41AM (#261076) Journal

      The reason I gave up broadcast/cable was commercials, but streaming on demand does not prevent commercials at all. Example, youtube. So I'm not clear why on-demand streaming is not really on these companies' radars.

      • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday November 10 2015, @08:35PM

        by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday November 10 2015, @08:35PM (#261420) Homepage Journal

        Perhaps because individual streaming to 10000 active customers takes 10000 data channels whereas sending 200 channels to everyone just takes 300.

        • (Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Tuesday November 10 2015, @09:03PM

          by hemocyanin (186) on Tuesday November 10 2015, @09:03PM (#261429) Journal

          And Netflix manages to do this for far less charge, so what is wrong with cable companies?

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by drussell on Tuesday November 10 2015, @05:00AM

    by drussell (2678) on Tuesday November 10 2015, @05:00AM (#261089) Journal

    Am I the only one here that uses something like MythTV?

    My backend box has 8 x 2TB drives in it, I've got tens of thousands of shows recorded on it that I can watch at my leisure.

    I tell it what I want to watch, it figures out when to record it and from which source, automatically flags the commercials, etc.

    Why on eath would you want to use the cable company's "box" when you can build your own that seems about 1000 times better? :)

    • (Score: 1) by Rickter on Tuesday November 10 2015, @06:00AM

      by Rickter (842) on Tuesday November 10 2015, @06:00AM (#261107)

      I just bought a Magnivox DVD Recorder w/ Hard Drive (basically a DVD DVR combo machine - to upgrade from and SD to upscaled DVD quality). Then, a few months later, I find out that I'm going to have to have a cable box, which means I'll have to manually change the channels on the Cable box so the DVR can record them while set to channel 4 (I think this is how it will work, I haven't tested this and I'm rather pissed at the cable company for this, and I'm glad I didn't try to spend even more to make a MythTV box).

      I'm seriously considering dumping the cable (already called the company a few months ago, and they gave us free basic for a year to not dump the service, only to find out we were getting cable boxes), and going with only Roku, commercial free Hulu, although we may explore Netflix and Amazon Prime. I hope so many people decide that they are so over being jerked around by the cable companies that they do like wise, and we see dozens or more options to get a la carte programing, and anybody can get exactly what the cable company never would give us. Of course, we'll probably continue to see the Internet bill go up to cover the missing revenue that the cable companies will be losing. Google Fiber can't come here fast enough.

      • (Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday November 10 2015, @01:02PM

        by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday November 10 2015, @01:02PM (#261215)

        I'm glad I didn't try to spend even more to make a MythTV box

        If you had, you'd plug a IR dongle thingy into a USB or serial port and with some screwing around the mythtv box would tell the cable box what to do to tune as if it were an IR remote control. Three areas of concern, it is easy but unbelievably tedious and time consuming to set up, the stb needs infrared input not bluetooth like a roku or whatever, and the output of the stb needs to be something that your mythtv box can eat, and just because cable connector XYZ is on the back of a stb doesn't mean the cableco activates it. HDCP can be annoying, better do component (the five plugs) or go gray market for something that doesn't care about HDCP.

        But, basically, if you had gone mythtv it would work, with some pain and suffering during the implementation of course.

        I'm with drussel, I set mythtv up 15 years ago.

        On the output / frontend side, I've gone thru at least two generations of hardware, thinking about what the next gen will be, seeing as a rasp-pi should have enough horsepower to be a HDTV frontend, my next batch of frontends might just be pi's in little metal cases.

        On the input side / backend side I have video files obtained by the usual technical means, an ethernet attached hdhomerun for locals and the big networks which works perfectly, and a legacy analog tuner capture card for my remaining analog cable channels. A giant full size tower with dual TB drives acts as my file server and backend and capture box.

        I worry that the ethernet on a pi isn't fast enough to handle HDMI. Its like USB 1.0 ethernet dongle permanently wired to the on board USB hub, its not very fast.

        The biggest problem I have with my mythtv system is I'm not a big TV viewer so its hard to justify spending 5 hours of hobby time per year on something I'll only probably watch 5 hours this month, and I have amazon prime for the free shipping which means I also have free streaming video, more than I'll ever watch. So I download certain youtube videos related to my interests and rarely obtain anime via various sources and pretty much all my other viewing needs are handled by the roku streaming amazon video. I can't remember the last time I watched something I recorded off legacy analog cable. Some times I'll tune around live over the air TV but there's nothing to watch there either. The IQ level of TV seems to have gone dramatically downward over recent decades, there's just nothing left to watch.

        The design of mythtv sucks ass. The original audio player was "navigate a directory tree and click to listen" which absolutely rocked and my wife and kids and relatives all loved it, but they scrapped that and replaced it with a hyper complicated DJ scheduling jukebox with queues and randomization and modes of operation and it sucks beyond comprehension and is completely wife and kid proof, so no listening to music off the myth anymore. Also the designers make it as much of an unholy pain in the ass to add external files to the recorded system as possible, what a gang of morons, none the less at great effort running 500 line bash scripts its possible to inject downloaded files into the "recorded" queue, which is pretty awesome when it works. Also they actively oppose RSS / video podcast feeds as a recorded video source, which is nuts. To some extent you can assume mythtv development leadership is basically the old Robert Conquest rule of politics where its out of touch leadership is indistinguishable from a cabal of their enemies. Use it while you can, before they completely finish the job of ruining it.

    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 10 2015, @01:43PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 10 2015, @01:43PM (#261232)

      Am I the only one here that uses something like MythTV?

      I used to, back when a cable box wasn't required to decrypt the channels. I had multiple tuners recording shows simultaneously but when everything became encrypted it just wasn't worth the hassle to rig up some IR device to change the channels on the tuner automatically plus being reduced to a single channel as well. Also I found that I was frequently deleting shows without bothering to watch them as I was recording way more series than I could ever have time for. Eventually I stopped watching TV almost altogether, now it's only BluRay or Netflix.

    • (Score: 2) by jmorris on Tuesday November 10 2015, @04:44PM

      by jmorris (4844) on Tuesday November 10 2015, @04:44PM (#261319)

      No, I do it too. Cablecard was the secret weapon the cable companies could have leveraged to stay in the game, much like they dominated during the 'cable ready' period. But greed and stupidity are ending them.

      They should admit that they will never design the ultimate cable box. It isn't their main business and NO one product is ever going to be 'the one' anyway. It is as stupid as forcing you to buy one of a small selection of TV sets from them. The potential of CableCard was to reignite the free market in cable compatible gear but CableLabs and the programming providers made the tech so restricted, made certification take years, etc. while the cable companies themselves were content to keep adoption low so they could get that extra $15/mo for their crappy DVR that nobody likes.

      My MythTV doesn't get all of the channels I pay for, even though I knew better than to even try to get the 'premiums' in the first place. Others I get in standard def only while a couple I get HD only. It is a cluster fsck. And we all live under a death sentence anyway since Fox is scheduled to demand removal of copy freely in their next contract renewal, see the complaints in the Myth mailing lists. Of course all of that is secret (so much for public utility) so we have no way of knowing which cable systems will go dark when. Comcast is the current problem child. Eventually enough programming goes away that I cut the cord. Their box simply isn't an option, I have seen it and it sucks donkey balls.

      It is the classic stupid problem. They 'protect' their 'precious' so much that paying for it becomes so inconvenient that stealing it will soon become so much easier even if it means that I'll be relearning the ways of Usenet. I'm currently happy to pay but only if I can actually watch the crap on my own terms. Skipping 30 seconds at a press over the autoflagged commercials, playing back at 130% speed, etc. Big enough drive to keep a supply of the kiddie crap that isn't totally mind rotting on hand for when the grandkids are over. Etc. Sure Myth can also dump shows to DVD but why? It is TV, not anything really important. They vastly overvalue their product.