Cablevision Reaches out to touch someone
As has been in the news (and advertised to high hell) for the past few days here in NJ, Cablevision and ABC are involved in a feud. Cablevision is advertising everywhere – I heard at least 4 ads on the drive home from work about how ABC is making unreasonable demands, asking for $40M, etc.
Well, then I found something more interesting. I stopped at a friend’s after work and turned on the (Cablevision) cable box. Strange. It was a full-screen ad from Cablevision about the ABC situation. And it seemed to go on forever. But… huh? The cable box was tuned to channel… 1999. I changed the channel, and got regular TV back.
But when I got home and turned on my cable box – which was last tuned to channel 47 and is setup to resume on the last channel it was tuned to – it also started up to the Cablevision ad on channel 1999.
To anyone who’s read Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, this is as clear an indication of the problems with appliancization as anything.
Don’t take this lightly. It has some serious implications. Specifically, the basics of what Cablevision did:
- Pushed out a new software version to all of their cable boxes, very quickly, that added a new channel.
- Changed an arbitrary setting in the configuration of their customer’s boxes (the channel that displays at power on) remotely.
The idea that Cablevision can control all of their customer’s boxes remotely, and this quickly, is a bit disturbing. If any of you have ever checked out the diagnostic mode on a Scientific Atlanta box, you’d know that it’s more or less a full computer (the “channels” are actually streaming media over IP) and the amount of control that Cablevision has is virtually limitless.
(The automatic channel change has been confirmed by a number of other people.)
Man, there is nothing disturbing about this at all (Aside from them using these functions to try to smear ABC). The same thing happens with your cable/dsl modem for internet. In fact, if you were to read your contract/EULA in detail, they have the right to do this, and you would have given it to them.
Simply put, its in their rights to do this, and to expect that they can’t and shouldn’t be able to do this is simply naive.
I never said that they didn’t have the right to do it – I read my EULA. I never even said that they shouldn’t be able to do it – however it does open up a lot of thoughts about their technical capabilities (how easily would they monitor/record my viewing habits without making it more explicit than the size 6 print?)
The real issues are two-fold: First, most of their (non-technical) customers probably don’t realize the amount of control they actually have over the set-top boxes. Secondly, on the practical side, the only thing this will really do is upset customers – I already heard enough of their advertising about the ABC thing on the radio and on regular TV ads, it just pushes it one step further when I have to see it every time I turn on my TV.
Disturbing? Hell no. Hilarious? Hell yes!