PLUG-AND-PLAY AGREEMENT STILL DIVIDES SOME INDUSTRIES
The FCC should move quickly to adopt the industry agreement on cable compatibility, the NCTA said in the latest round of comments to the Commission, and objections by the MPAA and others should be dismissed because the proposed rules were modeled on those already developed for secure digital connectors and agreed to by MPAA studios and others. The CEA and the Consumer Electronics Retailers Coalition agreed, but MPAA and others said hasty Commission action would be harmful and unnecessary.
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NCTA said there was no need to change the treatment of subscription video-on-demand (SVOD), copy “one generation” shouldn’t permit an infinite number of portable copies, PVR pause features protect PVR functionality without undermining “copy never” protection, and HD carriage isn’t sufficient to alleviate concerns on the encoding rules. NCTA said: “The DFAST license agreement -- a commercial intellectual property license for which FCC adoption is neither sought nor warranted -- will be available when the rest of the regulatory regime is put in place.”
The NAB and MSTV said over-the-air tuning capability should be included in the cable-ready rules, and questioned why neither NCTA nor CEA explained its absence. They also asked that the FCC refine certain technical rules and ensure that consumers could fully access and use the program and tuning (PSIP) information carried in the broadcast stream. The Assn. of Public TV Stations, PBS and CPB said they, too, were disappointed the pact didn’t include the over-the-air ATSC tuner standard nor incorporate full PSIP navigation.
In joint comments, Public Knowledge and Consumers Union urged the FCC not to “pick a winner” on copy protection schemes. They also asked that the agency not cut off digital cable-ready products from accessing the Internet or using a cable modem, or foreclose the use of the Uniform Serial Bus (USB), or set encoding rules for each business model. Comcast said the Commission should reject NAB’s proposals to impose new requirements on cable operators relating to the processing of PSIP data, saying SCTE standards were sufficient. Comcast said it was committed to working with TiVo and other CE manufacturers to design a next-generation POD that could support many programming streams for PVR recording and other applications.
None of the reams of first-round comments filed with the FCC (CD Dec 20 p1) cast “appreciable doubt” on the Commission’s jurisdiction to enact the cable-CE interoperability deal, CEA and CERC said. They said MPAA and others seeking “further constraints on consumers misdirect their attention and complaints to the encoding rules” in plug-and-play agreement. CE groups said MPAA arguments “appear to be based either on a fundamental misunderstanding, or a basic mischaracterization, of what the encoding rules address and provide for.”
However, MPAA said commenters in support of plug-and- play failed to “draw any connection” between the agreement’s set of encoding rules and cable compatibility. “Instead, cable and CE commenters attempted to bootstrap an argument that the inclusion of content protection in the DFAST license requires Commission intervention to ensure that content protection is not abused by content providers,” MPAA said.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said reviewing the comments was “a bit like Alice’s trip through the looking glass.” EFF said it was strange reading that movie studios were advocating fewer regulations while CE and cable industries pleaded for “regulations that will bind not just them but all multichannel video programming distributors” (MVPDs). Notwithstanding the harmony depicted when the cable and CE industries announced the agreement, “there is not even an appearance of ‘consensus'” in proposed rulemaking, the EFF said.