Q. My cable company finally scrambled all the channels so they can only be received with a cable box. Can I at least purchase these boxes anywhere? A. This e-mail conveniently arrived on the day ...

You’re paying too much for your cable boxes. If you’re like the average American household, you’ve likely got two boxes, which you rent from your television provider for close to $200 a year. That’s a ...

The Federal Communications Commission voted on Thursday to unlock the cable-box market. The details will be worked out in the coming months, but basically this means that you'll no longer have to rent ...

Cable TV customers are fond of complaining about their ever-rising monthly bills, which now average almost $100. Although the main factor has been the growing sums of cash the cable operators have to ...

Last week, the Federal Communications Commission suggested that the cable box business is broken, and it offered a plan to fix it. Under the FCC’s proposal, TV operators would have to supply their ...

Cord-cutting has become so popular that some small cable companies are joining in, trading their own set-top boxes for streaming TV service. This week, a video delivery company called MobiTV announced ...

Commentary: A proposal by Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler calls for cable companies like Comcast to "unlock the set-top box." Unlocking isn't enough. The box should die, once ...

If you do cable TV, you're a renter. You need that set-top-box that connects the cable to your television, and chances are, your cable company won't let you buy the thing. You're forced to rent it, ...

[Peter]’s folks’ cable company is terrible – such a surprise for a cable TV provider – and the digital part of their cable subscription will only work with the company’s cable boxes. The cable company ...

CableCARD: sure, one day it might take the world by storm, but right now, the only place it's being deployed en masse is in cable operators' set-top box offerings. Ironically, the card was designed to ...

In the middle of the night, when most Americans are sound asleep, their lights and appliances off, a power hog is wide awake and running at nearly full throttle: the boxes that operate their cable or ...

One of the least glamorous realities of the American cable industry is a relic invented in 1948: the cable box. The box has become a fixture in the American household, not least because it is ...