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really old school tvs used to have this knob on the front that you use to change
the channels then when more than like four channels
or whatever came about you needed what was called an analog cable box so that
you could finally ditch the foil covered rabbit ears then they had a brilliant
idea and started building cable tuners directly into the tv decluttering our
living rooms once and for all
for a little while until digital cable hit the scene in the
mid-2000s now i'm sure at the time i wasn't the only
one who felt a little bit ridiculous going back to prehistoric looking clunky
cable boxes to get these crispy new high
def shows and movies so why did they do it well
at first there was actually a real technological reason for those set-top
boxes just because a tv could accept an analog
cable signal with its built-in tuner didn't necessarily mean that it could
accept a digital one hence the need for a separate box but then
fast forward to 2018 and not only do most tvs have digital
tuners built in but they have like smart features that can handle use cases all
the way from video conferencing to casting youtube videos to streaming
other paid services like netflix so what gives now unsurprisingly a big part of
the answer has to do with the cable company's long-running battle against
piracy back in the analog cable days the cable
industry had an uphill battle on its hands unless a technician showed up on
site it was very hard if not impossible
to guarantee that a user hadn't spliced together some wires to piggyback on a
neighbor's tv signal and the courts ruled that yes users are allowed to have
vcrs and they are allowed to record their favorite shows for their own
consumption so digital content was an opportunity to take control of the
situation using digital rights management or drm in the form of these
physical boxes that decrypted the signal and had to be bought or released
directly from the provider wait hold on a second Linus i can access
plenty of my copy protected programs with a smartphone and this doesn't need
a big clunky box on it okay so it's true then that you don't need powerful
hardware to decrypt a scrambled or a copy protected
desperate housewives signal in fact around 10 years ago there was a push to
get a technology called cable card into more tvs these were small devices that
used the old pc card form factor that you could insert into a supported tv or
even computer with a digital tuner that would authorize you and let you start
watching no set top box required well gee that sounds great doesn't it
the major issue was that cable cards only supported one-way communication
meaning that consumers would miss out on program guides on-demand and
pay-per-view options and dvr functionality and although american
cable providers have been required to offer cable cards since 2011 by that
time the technology had already basically failed due to its technical
limitations and reluctance from the cable companies to support it earlier as
they wanted to instead hang on to their own proprietary content protection
schemes these days finding a new tv with a cable card slot built in is virtually
impossible and successors that allowed two-way communication never really took
off due to weak industry support from both cable providers and groups like the
mpaa who were fearful of a government-mandated
one-size-fits-all approach although the industry maintains that it simply wants
to be able to keep its own systems to protect content creators and continue
innovating many skeptical consumers have opined that the sweet revenue they get
from those monthly box rental fees doesn't hurt matters either whatever the
reason the industry fought hard against a 2016 fcc proposal to allow consumers
more choice when it came to set-top boxes such as buying them from third
parties and to this day in the us anyway there's no practical way to get digital
cable without renting a box from your provider a source of frustration for
many as even though many cable companies now allow you to stream most channels
online through a smart tv app this method is more prone to buffering and
slowdowns which you can learn more about up here that and cord cutting just still
isn't viable for those who want to watch networks that require a cable
subscription in order to stream them so bottom line if you want to get a legit
full fat digital cable stream to your sleek OLED tv you'll probably still have
to put up with giving up a pound of flesh every month for our clunky cable
box but i don't know maybe there's something they could do to make them more
tolerable like like how about RGB lighting
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