From the San Jose Mercury:
Looking to expand the reach of high-speed Internet, federal regulators look to the television.
WASHINGTON — Looking to pare the shrinking but substantial number of Americans without high-speed Internet, federal officials are considering taking advantage of a technology that practically everyone has at home: the TV.
The Federal Communications Commission wants to revamp the market for set-top boxes — the channel-switching devices that cable and satellite subscribers typically lease for $5 or $10 a month — and equip the machines with Internet-surfing capability.
The thinking is simple: 99 percent of households have a television, and 76 percent have a personal computer. So why not piggyback on the TV to extend the reach of high-speed broadband, which lawmakers and regulators see as a necessity for anyone to function in the 21st century economy?
If the commission is successful, it could usher in an era in which people use a single gadget to watch cable shows, download movies from the Web and surf the Internet — all on their TVs.
"If you had a set-top box that can access traditional cable but also get to the Internet, more people could start to see the value of having broadband," said Matt Wood, associate director of Media Access Project, a public interest law firm.
But beyond pushing high-speed Internet into more homes, advocates say the FCC's effort could spark a transformation of the basic set-top cable box into a high-tech, multiuse machine, much like the cell phone has been revolutionized by the BlackBerry and the iPhone. "We've seen a steady march of TVs and separate boxes that provide Web-based video," such as the TiVo and Roku devices, said Brian Markwalter, vice president of technology and standards for the Consumer Electronics Association. "When you can integrate that with the other pieces you're paying for" — cable or satellite programming — "it will spark all sorts of creativity."
The FCC has also signaled that it wants consumers to be able to use the same set-top box for any type of TV service — cable, satellite or fiber-optic — allowing them to switch from one carrier to another without obtaining a major new piece of equipment from the provider. That could spur more people to buy set-top boxes instead of leasing them.
"It's time "... to consider if there are better ways to open the set-top box market to greater competition and innovation," William Lake, the FCC's media bureau chief, said at a public meeting recently. To drive that point home, FCC officials pointed out that there currently are 14 set-top boxes that consumers can buy at stores vs. nearly 900 types of mobile phones.
The FCC is a long way from imposing any new rules for set-top boxes; this month it sought public comment on ways to spur "video device innovation," the initial step in what would be an extensive set of proceedings. But it is part of a broader undertaking of the commission under its new chairman, Julius Genachowski, to lower barriers for people to access video and other offerings over the Internet.
The effort could pick up steam with the commission's expected February release of its national broadband plan, which will propose strategies to make high-speed Internet available to the roughly one-third of American homes that lack it.
This would not be the first time the federal government has gotten involved in the set-top box realm. Prodded by Congress and the FCC in the mid-90s, the cable industry developed technology that allows customers to switch from one cable provider to another using the same set-top box. But that effort is widely perceived as a failure, in part because of shortcomings in the technology and in part because of the emergence over the past decade of noncable video service providers such as satellite and fiber-optic.
The stakes for cable and other video service providers of any potential FCC initiative are high. Making it easier for consumers to get Web-based video presumably would mean one less reason for them to pay for expensive channel packages.
In a filing to the FCC this month, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, which represents cable firms, said it supports the commission's look at why a vibrant retail market for set-top boxes hasn't developed. At the same time, the cable group questioned whether a market exists for set-top boxes that could cost hundreds of dollars and risk becoming obsolete as technology advances. The group cautioned that a mandate to require Web-enabled set-top boxes could substantially increase costs for consumers.
"To add full Internet capability to even the newest generation of set-top boxes would require more processing power, a browser, PC plug-ins (Silverlight, Adobe, etc.), media content protection clients, parental controls, virus and malware protection, and a remote keyboard and mouse, among other features," the association stated in its filing. "Most of the cost would be borne by the millions of (cable, satellite and fiber-optic) subscribers who already have a computer and who may have no interest in having Internet functionality added to their television sets."
Indeed, past attempts to integrate TV and the Internet — including WebTV and Apple TV — never gained much traction. Whether an all-in-one device that surfs the Web, accesses online video and broadcasts TV programming would have more appeal is an open question.
Critics suspect cable companies are raising doubts just to protect their turf.
"The incumbents are always going to raise excuses why it can't work," said Matthew Zinn, senior vice president and general counsel of Alviso-based TiVo. "The cable operators want to maintain a walled garden and keep consumers captive."
