One of the benefits of the FCC's often-laborious process of rulemaking is that it allows new issues to be discovered and resolved. This is what has happened in the Commission's proceeding on a seemingly-arcane issue: "encryption of the basic tier."

This week the tech world will descend on Las Vegas for the annual Consumer Electronics Show.  While there is nothing subtle about a 152-inch 3D plasma TV there are plenty of subtle forces coming from DC that shape what you see at shows like CES and at retailers like Amazon and Best Buy.  Here are just four examples.

AllVid or Why Can’t Apple, Google, Microsoft, Roku, and Boxee Boxes Get Cable Channels?

In the US broadcasters have certain “retransmission” rights—cable systems cannot just carry broadcast stations willy nilly. This is a complex, highly regulated area of the law that tries to balance the interests of viewers, cable systems, broadcasters, and content creators. Broadcasters have two choices: must-carry and retransmission consent. The latter option is more negotiation-intensive and in recent years, broadcasters who also own cable channels have started including those channels in negotiations with cable TV providers.

Public Knowledge's Position

Public Knowledge fights to ensure that broadcast and cable companies do not punish the consumer while negotiating with each other, and to prevent issues of intellectual property from distorting these agreements.

What you can do to help

Public Knowledge’s Position

In the Telecommunications Act of 1996, Congress told the FCC to increase competition in video devices—consumer electronics that can display and interact with pay TV content. That competition is still missing.

A consumer should be able to attach any non-harmful device to a cable network and access the programming that they are paying for. After all, when cable was analog you could simply plug your TV directly into cable.

This ability should apply to more than just “cable,” however—today, satellite TV is more popular than ever, and Verizon and AT&T offer subscription TV services that aren’t strictly “cable” (The FCC calls these MVPDs, or “Multichannel Video Programming Distributors”).

On today's podcast, we discuss disruptions - or nondisruptions - in the music (here, here, here, and here) and pay-TV industries (here and here).  We also chat with Zak Homuth of Upverter about creating tools to design open source hardware, just what open source hardware means, and the Sleep-n-Tweet.

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We have been talking more and more about the arbitrary limits that ISPs (both wired and wireless) have been imposing on consumers’ internet connections.  These limits are arbitrary because they do not seem to be based on any sort of technical evaluation.  AT&T wireless and Verizon wireless impose a 2 GB limit on their standard data packages – why 2GB as opposed to, say 1 GB or 3 GB?  Similarly, AT&T (wired) imposes a 150 GB limit on customers [update: AT&T imposes a 150 GB cap on DSL customers and a 250 GB cap on U-verse customers].  Comcast’s limit is 250 GB.  Where did these limits come from?  No one (outside of the company) has any idea.  For all we know, the companies just spun a big wheel to choose the cap.  In this murky world the only thing that is clear is that, while AT&T and Comcast’s network supports hundreds of TV channels, their internet limits prevent you from getting rid of their pay-TV offering and replacing it with a competing internet video service.

Usually, routine letters to the FCC from industry players, asking it to take some action or pleading with it not to, don’t get much coverage. But the tech press has picked up on an amazingly overheated letter (PDF link) from the NCTA (cable’s trade association), where it claims that AllVid (which we’ve written about on the blog many times) would turn cable systems into nothing but “wholesalers,” and that allowing users a choice of user interfaces with which to view their content would throw their businesses into disarray.

There’s a perpetual war against new entrants in the communications industry. Right now, there’s a skirmish over ivi, a startup Internet video service that’s daring to claim some of the same statutory rights as old-school cable systems. ivi offers a new kind of service that is, at the same time, quite old. Like cable systems have been doing since the 1940s, ivi retransmits broadcast stations to subscribers who might not be able to tune in any other way. But ivi sends the signals over the Internet. It’s not a service like Hulu or Netflix that offers disaggregated program content, stripped of commercials or with new ones. And it’s not like Youtube or Vimeo—ivi is only viewable by paying subscribers. ivi simply increases the number of potential viewers for a station by boosting its signal, unchanged, over the Internet.

On today's podcast, we talk the Fox/Cablevision retransmission battle, Comcast's announcement that you don't need to be on a Comcast Internet connection to get Xfinity video, Apple's universal SIM card that will never be useful in the United States, the copyright protections that were the secret to Netflix's success, and Amazon's small step towards allowing book sharing on the Kindle.

You can download the audio directly by clicking here (MP3) or stream it using the player below:

Want to subscribe to our podcast? Click here for the MP3 feed and here for the mixed audio/video feed.