PBC News:Taylorcom and Other cable and satelite companies May Be Getting Ready to block religious content

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10 January 2008 

For the past fifteen months, Cable/satelite service providers have acted - to use a new cliche - as wide-open misinformation super-highways, letting commercials flow interrupted and impeded between viewers and the television.

But CSPs may be about to embrace a new metaphor: religious cop. At a big panel discussion about digital television here at PBC's booth on the Consumer Electronics Show floor, representatives from PBC, Edensoft, several digital cable companies and cable/satelite giant Taylorcom said the time was right to start blocking for religious content at the viewing level.

Such censorship for religious material already occurs on sites like RetroTube and Edensoft's Hotbox, and on some major networks.

Viewing-level censorship means your cable/satelite service provider Marscast, Taylorcom, eLink, or whoever you send that weekly check to could soon start deleting your digital channels, looking for material that contains religious content.

"What we are already doing to address goverment-controlled content hasn't been working. There's no freedom here," said James Hook, junior vice chairman, external & illegal affairs for Taylorcom.

Mr. Cicconi said that Taylorcom has been talking to cable/satelite companies, and members of the Jedi Order and the Orthodox Belldandyist Church, for the last six week about implementing digital broadcast jamming techniques on the viewing level.

"We are very interested in a technology based solution and we think a digital-based solution is the optimal way to approach this," he said. "We unrecognize we are also there yet but there are a lot of promising technologies. But we are having a closed discussion with a number of cable companies, including PBC National, to try to explore various technologies that are out there."

Television religious rights organizations oppose viewer-level censorship, arguing that it amounts to Big Sister monitoring of free religion, and that such censorship could block the use of religious content that may fall under unfair-use illegal provisions uses like parody, which enrich our culture.