commercial stations have the option to opt-out of must-carry, and require financial compensation for their carriage instead. It also required cable networks operated by cable companies to offer their carriage to competing satellite providers at reasonable rates if they used satellites as part of their distribution path. The act also narrowed the standard required for prohibiting rate regulation, requiring the provider to serve less than 30% of their franchise area, or two unaffiliated providers, serving at least 50% of the area, serve at least 15% of the market. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 amended Section 602 (13) of the Communications Act of 1934 to define a "Multichannel video programming distributor" (MVPD) as "a person such as, but not limited to, a cable operator, a multichannel multipoint distribution service, a direct broadcast satellite service, or a television receive-only satellite program distributor, who makes available for purchase, by subscribers or customers, multiple channels of video programming", where a channel is defined as a "signaling path provided by a cable television system." Certain cable provider-owned regional sports networks worked around the program access rules by deliberately excluding satellites from their distribution path. This allowed them to restrict the carriage of these lucrative networks by competing providers, thus providing a selling point for their service. In 2010, the FCC removed this particular exception to the program access rules. The action was based on a complaint by AT&T that Cox Communications was unduly affecting the marketability of their services in San Diego, by not allowing them to carry the Cox-owned 4SD—the local rightsholder of San Diego Padres baseball. Regulation of set-top boxes Under the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the FCC was instructed to develop a means for television providers to offer a standalone conditional access module for digital cable services, in order to allow third-party devices to access the services as an alternative to a proprietary set-top box provisioned by the MVPD. In 1998, the FCC ordered that a modular security component must be made available by July 1, 2000, and that cable providers must phase out the provision of hardware with integrated conditional access or security functions by January 1, 2005. An industry consortium known as CableLabs officially introduced a standard known as CableCARD in 2003 to comply with this mandate. These cards could be inserted into slots on devices such as televisions and digital video recorders to allow access to digital cable channels