12 Huge TV Industry Changes Coming In 2014

8. HD Streaming Cable Boxes

Good news to all you US cable subscribers with cable boxes: between June and August, your cable provider will have to replace your cable box with a streaming capable one. Why? The Federal Communications Commission mandated that all cable providers add this ability.

While some cable networks and providers have set up their own streaming services, they are all reliant on having a working internet connection. Worse, several of the cable networks won't allow you to use their streams without account information for one of a handful of national ISPs, locking out people who rely on smaller, regional ISPs. A streaming cable box sidesteps both of those issues, although it does force you to have a pretty good wireless network. Even better, the FCC mandates means that you can stream to any device and even record the stream (something not easily done with regular Internet livestreams). In fact, the only apparent downsides to this whole thing are network bandwidth and the fact that ANY standard interface protocol works, so there's no guarantee that this will be a plug and play service.