FCC ruling on set-top boxes could save Americans $20B

Roughly 100 million US households could save $20 billion a year under a move taken Thursday by the Federal Communications Commission.

The Washington regulator, looking to “unlock the box,” voted to allow pay-TV subscribers to buy their own set-top boxes.

Currently, subscribers are forced to rent the box from their pay-TV provider at an average price of just over $19 a month — or $231 a year.

The FCC, which voted 3-2 in favor of the move, noted that 99 percent of the 100 million pay-TV households in the country lease their set-top box from their video provider, with no competition.

The cost of cable set-top boxes has risen 185 percent since 1994, the FCC said, whereas the cost of computers, TVs and mobile phones has dropped 90 percent.

TiVo, which sells set-tops to consumers and pay-TV operators and stands to emerge a winner after the FCC move, called the proposal “important to ensure choice for consumers, operators and content creators.” Apple and Google are also seen as potential winners in a newly competitive market.

The Future of Television Coalition, a group that includes pay-TV providers and the set-top box makers that supply them, blasted the FCC move, saying the “rule does not make sense” because it could erode household privacy “all for an unnecessary government giveaway to Big Tech.”

What the coalition did not address was the transparency promised by a separation of set-top providers and pay-TV operators.

The system now is so convoluted that a group of senators recently called for an investigation of industry billing practices, which it said are generating the “highest number” of FCC complaints.

On Feb. 17, the Consumerist website elaborated on what the senators called “obtuse fees” by parsing a Time Warner Cable bill. “[T]he price you actually pay can be 30-40 percent or more on top of [what you were told] thanks to a heap of sometimes confusing charges and fees,” it said.