Maybe a web app, maybe not a web app. Whether the code running on the Comcast set-top boxes is a web app or not doesn't matter. What does matter is that is is t

Maybe a web app, maybe not a web app. Whether the code running on the Comcast set-top boxes is a web app or not doesn't matter. What does matter is that is is that the code running on the Comcast set-top boxes is likely built with the assumption that it would only ever talk to Comcast's back-end, and Comcast's back-end is likely built with the assumption that it will only ever talk to Comcast's set-top box code. In other words, they're going to be tightly coupled. Sufficiently so that decoupling them enough to provide an API compliant with the FCC's proposed ruling is going to be an expensive engineering task that Comcast would rather not have to spend money on.