Ulmo
join:2005-09-22
San Jose, CA
 ·Comcast
 ·SONIC.NET
| Sounds about right
I, like just about anybody who understands the improvement, am pro-SDV, and advocate it when I can. I congratulate the various TV delivery companies for going ahead with that.
I think the idea of near-monopoly businesses (which are that way thanks to lots of government regulations and fees and heavy buy-in fees for content, etc.) being able to force crappy interfaces into your household for something that's basically software and hardware agnostic technologically is, however, absurd, and do like the government interceding to put some regulation into that to require competition in the interface market, for as long as the market has failed to properly exist with the appropriate amount of freedoms. The CableCard, while complicated and annoying in many ways, seems to be the method everybody's using to achieve that when nothing else works, and if it continues to work, I'm pro-CableCard because of all of that.
I don't think one person's annual salary for only one year being applied to all these companies in aggregate is going to "impede progress just because of a few TiVo users". First of all, "just a few TiVo users" is wrong, since if the thing worked better, it could or might be more than "just a few". We're not talking about some animal species being the excuse to kill hundreds of thousands of United States citizens because we're not drilling oil in that region supposedly on behalf of saving that animal from extinction (actually it would survive just fine if we drilled there, and who cares about one dumb animal anyway?), or something. The TiVo is a real interface competition, for real people. Yes, TiVo sucks more than it used to, but at least it is there. Second, the $ amount they mentioned is not that much of an impediment.
If it were all fined against a small company or one person, those fees would be outrageous, but for an enormous company like those that probably saved more money not hiring people to fix those problems than they did pay fines for the problems, I don't see the problem. Of course, there may be details that make those considerations slightly different than I see them, but by how much? |
