You may have gotten a little closer to firing your cable box and cutting its $5 to $20 rent out of your monthly budget.
A revised proposal from the Federal Communications Commission would require your cable or satellite television provider to offer apps for most of your gadgets—at no extra charge, with the ability to record video on hardware that can store it.
But this proposal first must overcome determined resistance from companies that have been raking in TV-box fees for decades.
FCC to pay-TV providers: Get appy!
The proposal FCC chair Tom Wheeler introduced in a Los Angeles Times op-ed represents a massive shift. Today, your alternative to paying rent on a box is getting a TiVo or another of a handful of devices that connect to cable (not satellite) via “CableCard” authentication or using apps that often don’t let you watch TV on TV, only on smaller screens.
Instead, Wheeler’s piece explained, “pay-TV providers will be required to provide apps–free of charge–that consumers can download to the device of their choosing to access all the programming and features they already paid for.”
A three-page summary on the FCC’s site clarifies that these apps must be available on “widely deployed platforms, such as Roku, Apple iOS, Windows and Android.”
That means having at least five million devices ship in the US for that operating system in the previous year, a senior FCC official clarified in a conference call Thursday. So Apple’s (AAPL) OS X, Amazon’s (AMZN) Fire TV and Google’s (GOOG) Chromecast should also qualify.
The summary and Wheeler’s op-ed also say you’d be able to look up shows outside the app using your device’s own search function.
The largest TV providers, making up 95% of the market, would have two years to comply. Medium-sized operators would get another two years; firms with under 400,000 subscribers are exempt and can sit the whole thing out.
Neither the op-ed nor the document mentions recording, but in the call and a follow-up e-mail, FCC officials said pay-TV firms would have to offer DVR functions in apps for devices that can store video.
Satellite might be an exception, though. Because the signal from space can’t reach a computer, tablet or media player and satellites don’t deliver sufficient bandwidth for constant streaming video, you might still need one box at home.
The FCC plan, set for a vote by the five commissioners at the end of the month, leaves many details to subscription-TV firms, but it does include oversight of “a standard license governing the process for placing an app on a device or platform.” The commission saw how cable operators slow-walked CableCard with inconvenient and late deployment and doesn’t want a re-run of that.