[mythtv-users] Major networks HD encrypted by cable company?

Daniel Kristjansson danielk at cuymedia.net
Thu Nov 30 21:33:57 UTC 2006


On Thu, 2006-11-30 at 13:44 -0600, Eric Ladner wrote:
> On 11/29/06, John P Poet <jppoet at gmail.com> wrote:
> > ...  None of the
> > houses in her area have antennas, so either reception is impossible,
> > or there is some neighborhood covenant restricting them.
> >
> 
> Neighborhood covenants cannot restrict your right to put up an antenna.
> 
> The Over-the-Air Reception Devices Rule (OTARD rule) prohibits
> entities, such as community associations, from creating restrictions
> that impair the installation, maintenance or use of antennas used to
> receive video programming.The OTARD rule prohibits entities, such as
> community associations, from creating restrictions that impair the
> installation, maintenance or use of antennas used to receive video
> programming.

IANAL applies...

Right. I looked at this when considering buying a home in a historic
district. The local city authorities are allowed to tell you where
on the roof to put your antenna (like say in the back of the house
rather than the front) and they are allowed to make you file an
application and get approval first. They are not allowed to charge
you a fee of any sort ("building permit", "application fee", etc)
and they are not allowed to tell you to place the antenna somewhere
where it would cost more to place it. The example the FCC regs have
is a local ordinance that forces homeowners/renters to place their
satellite antenna in the back yard instead of on the roof, this
law type of law is illegal.

However there are limits to the antennas you can install under these
FCC rules. In the continental US, this is something like 1.5 meters,
while in Alaska the antenna can be much larger. This also only applies
to receiving antennas. Local authorities can prevent you from installing
a tiny WiFi antenna, or using your satellite dish with one of those
internet over satellite services, or installing a HAM radio antenna
of any size.

As to the cable company being allowed to encrypt OTA digital
channels, I don't think there is any legitimate way to read the
regulations that way. If any cable company is making this argument
I haven't heard it, though they might be telling customers this.
I suspect the problem is more likely incompetence + lack of
enforcement by the FCC. My experience with Firewire is my main
reason for thinking this. My last cable operator, RCN Manhattan,
knew they were breaking the law, but had no idea how to get the
millions of DCT-62xx's they shipped out to their customers to
work. When I was trying to get the issue resolved everything
I said was forwarded to Motorola and their obfuscated response
would be relayed to me, their 'best engineers' knew bubkus about
how their tech worked or how to configure it.

RCN encrypted only pay channels over QAM, but encrypted DVI
and Firewire from their STBs. My current cable provider encrypts
C-SPAN and all the public service cable channels run by the city
(traffic cam, city hall hearings, etc), but all the OTA channels,
including digital, are available. But that's it -- OTA + 2 channel
guide channels are free-to-air, everything else is locked down hard.

It looks like there is no real thought put into what to encrypt,
the equipment providers set up the system and configure the
equipment so that everything that is legally allowed to be
encrypted is encrypted. The equipment providers presumably charge
more for each remux that encrypts its streams and they see $$$
when they talk to a Cable company executive. Cable companies
either don't have competent engineers, the execs don't trust
the advise of their engineers, or perhaps the engineers just
shrug and assume the "encrypt everything" order was a policy
decision and they don't want to deal with the endless meetings that
might result if management _doesn't_ totally ignore their advice.

For the equipment providers this is a win-win, they sell more
encrypting equipment than the cable company needs, and they
will get the service calls to reconfigure the remuxers so that
things like my city's traffic cam and city hall cam channels
are not-encrypted. Later they might get called to turn off
encryption for the home shopping channels and the advertising
supported channels, like the golf channel. $ $ $

-- Daniel



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