The proposed plug-and-play agreement on cable-CE compatibility (C...
The proposed plug-and-play agreement on cable-CE compatibility (CD April 1 p5), although “potentially a very significant step” toward offering consumers “additional choices with respect to cable TV… contains some critical flaws,” TiVo told the FCC in comments. The accord…
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signed by CE and cable companies wouldn’t do “nearly enough” to assure small innovative companies such as TiVo that they would have the ability to innovate in a market for competitive navigation devices that were “at least as good as set-top devices provided to consumers by MSOs,” the filing said. It urged the FCC to “expressly confirm” that the agreement would enable marketing of navigation devices “that consumers can directly attach to their DTV receivers” for cable-TV service reception “without the need for a set-top box provided by the cable operator.” TiVo also said the proposed encoding rules were “anticonsumer and should not be enacted.” Meanwhile, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) asked the FCC to “clarify and reaffirm” Commission rules that basic-tier cable services, digital or analog, “remain unencrypted.” EFF argued that consumers “should, at a minimum, continue to have access to an unscrambled basic tier of cable service,” including any over-the-air digital or analog programming retransmitted. If cable providers were to encrypt basic-tier digital services, consumers would need to use point of deployment (POD) modules to receive that content, EFF said: “If this is the case, then the MOU would be tantamount to a technology mandate on all devices that can connect to digital cable services.”