Why Do We Still Need Cable Boxes?
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2019-05-06
·
1,118 words · ~5 min read
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really old school tvs used to have this knob on the front that you use to change
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the channels then when more than like four channels
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or whatever came about you needed what was called an analog cable box so that
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you could finally ditch the foil covered rabbit ears then they had a brilliant
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idea and started building cable tuners directly into the tv decluttering our
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living rooms once and for all
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for a little while until digital cable hit the scene in the
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mid-2000s now i'm sure at the time i wasn't the only
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one who felt a little bit ridiculous going back to prehistoric looking clunky
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cable boxes to get these crispy new high
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def shows and movies so why did they do it well
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at first there was actually a real technological reason for those set-top
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boxes just because a tv could accept an analog
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cable signal with its built-in tuner didn't necessarily mean that it could
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accept a digital one hence the need for a separate box but then
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fast forward to 2018 and not only do most tvs have digital
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tuners built in but they have like smart features that can handle use cases all
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the way from video conferencing to casting youtube videos to streaming
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other paid services like netflix so what gives now unsurprisingly a big part of
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the answer has to do with the cable company's long-running battle against
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piracy back in the analog cable days the cable
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industry had an uphill battle on its hands unless a technician showed up on
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site it was very hard if not impossible
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to guarantee that a user hadn't spliced together some wires to piggyback on a
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neighbor's tv signal and the courts ruled that yes users are allowed to have
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vcrs and they are allowed to record their favorite shows for their own
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consumption so digital content was an opportunity to take control of the
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situation using digital rights management or drm in the form of these
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physical boxes that decrypted the signal and had to be bought or released
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directly from the provider wait hold on a second Linus i can access
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plenty of my copy protected programs with a smartphone and this doesn't need
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a big clunky box on it okay so it's true then that you don't need powerful
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hardware to decrypt a scrambled or a copy protected
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desperate housewives signal in fact around 10 years ago there was a push to
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get a technology called cable card into more tvs these were small devices that
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used the old pc card form factor that you could insert into a supported tv or
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even computer with a digital tuner that would authorize you and let you start
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watching no set top box required well gee that sounds great doesn't it
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the major issue was that cable cards only supported one-way communication
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meaning that consumers would miss out on program guides on-demand and
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pay-per-view options and dvr functionality and although american
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cable providers have been required to offer cable cards since 2011 by that
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time the technology had already basically failed due to its technical
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limitations and reluctance from the cable companies to support it earlier as
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they wanted to instead hang on to their own proprietary content protection
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schemes these days finding a new tv with a cable card slot built in is virtually
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impossible and successors that allowed two-way communication never really took
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off due to weak industry support from both cable providers and groups like the
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mpaa who were fearful of a government-mandated
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one-size-fits-all approach although the industry maintains that it simply wants
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to be able to keep its own systems to protect content creators and continue
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innovating many skeptical consumers have opined that the sweet revenue they get
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from those monthly box rental fees doesn't hurt matters either whatever the
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reason the industry fought hard against a 2016 fcc proposal to allow consumers
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more choice when it came to set-top boxes such as buying them from third
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parties and to this day in the us anyway there's no practical way to get digital
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cable without renting a box from your provider a source of frustration for
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many as even though many cable companies now allow you to stream most channels
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online through a smart tv app this method is more prone to buffering and
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slowdowns which you can learn more about up here that and cord cutting just still
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isn't viable for those who want to watch networks that require a cable
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subscription in order to stream them so bottom line if you want to get a legit
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full fat digital cable stream to your sleek OLED tv you'll probably still have
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to put up with giving up a pound of flesh every month for our clunky cable
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box but i don't know maybe there's something they could do to make them more
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tolerable like like how about RGB lighting
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