The tech media never lets up with thinkpieces about cord cutters and the imminent dire future for broadcast TV providers. Yet we’ve been reading these pronouncements for years now. And the broadcast landscape has changed a lot in that time. Whether it’s for better or worse is probably a matter of opinion.

I’ll concede that at this point the concept of broadcast providers is obsolete. The businesses that maintained independent silos running services to the home have long since morphed into each other.

Where I live, all the rival telecom carriers offer broadcast TV services. The cable and satellite broadcast providers offer telecom service. And everybody offers high speed internet. Further, all of them have intertwined their offerings in order to fend off the cord-cutting movement. Periodically I look at the numbers and everyone’s package options are structured so that it’s MORE economical to take at least a basic TV package bundled with your high speed internet.

And then there are subscription streaming services.

The legacy broadcasters are well aware of the challenge raised by Netflix and Amazon, not to mention the myriad small specialty streaming services. Their response, after initially sulking about it, has been to offer their own rival streaming services. Naturally, at least here in Canada, those streaming offerings from the broadcasters are packaged to make you take at least basic TV if you want them.

All of that was a roundabout intro to make my point that as an AV pro, you now have more broadcast hardware than ever to have to get your head around and integrate into your client’s entertainment systems.

If the market in which you operate has multiple rival service providers (and it probably does), then you know the pain of needing to be familiar with all of their hardware. That means having to deal with the chimerical and sometimes seemingly random and eccentric control codes for programming.

I find it but amusing and frustrating that for all of the advances that broadcast boxes have made, most of them are still fairly dumb units, especially compared to the streaming boxes from rivals like Apple TV.

Most of the broadcast hardware around here still depends on IR for remote controls, which I suppose isn’t the end of the world. But none of the boxes I’ve come into contact with in the last couple of years have working 3.5-mm IR jacks in the back, which means you still need to use IR eyes.

Really, what century is this?

Worse though is that even though for the last few years broadcast boxes have been coming with Ethernet ports on the back, none of them for our local providers are active and the boxes aren’t network enabled. As more and more of my home AV system is controlled by IP-remote control I feel overly indignant about that.

The other major headache with broadcast boxes is incidences where they lock up or freeze. Since so much of what gets installed in home entertainment has a hard drive and is driven by microprocessors, it should be a common best practice to hook them all up to installed power management and conditioning hardware. Not least, the ability to remotely reboot a cranky broadcast box is satisfying on a deep level.

Speaking of IP-enabled hardware or the lackthereof, my current source of aggravation is that the new BlueSkyTV hardware from Shaw Cable features voice control functionality.

Sounds great, right? Well, no.

The problem with BlueSkyTV is that the microphone for the voice control is embedded in the PVR’s remote control. And because the PVR is NOT network-enabled, there are zero options to integrate the voice control into your actual control system. 
If the TV room has an automation system, BlueSkyTV’s voice functionality exists in its own separate, incompatible silo.

That means that in addition to the remote control functionality of your automation, whether its on a mobile device or otherwise, you’ve got to leave the PVR’s remote control out on the coffee table.

So we’re back to multiple remote controls lined up on the coffee table. Great.