The Federal Communications Commission has opened up the way for companies to sell digital and analog cable television set top boxes on the open market in the US within two years. Yesterday, the Commission voted in new rules as a follow-on to the 1996 Telecommunications Reform Act, so that consumers should be able to buy set top boxes from stores, and hopefully expect them to work with any cable system. Currently, cable companies typically charge their subscribers a monthly fee for the boxes, and manufacturers, such as General Instrument Corp and Scientific Atlanta Inc, supply the cable operators. The FCC rules specify that before July 1 2000, cable operators must provide standard plug-in security cards to fit the boxes, enabling them to be connected up to separate cable systems. Security and scrambling features are currently bundled in with set top boxes, but the FCC will ban the sale of such built in security by 2005. The Open Cable project from the cable television industry’s own CableLabs research consortium has been developing some of the necessary standards. The move makes it possible for set top box functionality to be built into other consumer goods such as video cassette recorders, digital video disk players and personal computers. But the FCC says it realizes that compatibility problems between PCs, digital television and set top boxes will arise, and says it will continue to track the evolution of the technology. Circuit City Stores Inc chief executive Richard Sharp hailed the move as opening up a potentially immense market to technological competition and consumer choice.
