The FCC needs to adopt the cable-CE ‘plug-and-play’ agreement in ...

consideration of the encoding rules contained in the DTV interoperability agreement reached last Dec. (CD Dec 20 p1) would “disserve the public interest” and derail ongoing negotiations on bidirectional DTV devices, said NCTA. NCTA said applying same encoding rules to all multichannel video program distributors (MVPDs) “would enable cable operators to provide their customers with high-value digital content that they might otherwise not be able to obtain.” Thomson emphasized “the centrality of the encoding rules to the DFAST licensing scheme from the perspective of both the consumer electronics industry and consumers’ recording expectations.” Thomson said making DFAST license available to manufacturers would be difficult without Commission adoption of encoding rules. NCTA and Thomson filings summarized phone conversations their representatives had with Stacy Robinson, mass media legal adviser to FCC Comr. Abernathy, responding to her questions whether Commission should proceed with action on plug-and-play agreement and defer consideration of encoding rules until later. Robinson told us her queries only were part of “information gathering” effort. Robinson said her questions to NCTA, Thomson and other cable and CE interests were spurred by Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) proposal to consider “all the technical stuff” first on plug-and-play, and deal with encoding rules later. According to an EFF ex parte filing at FCC in late June, the group’s representatives met with Commission staff June 18 and repeated its call to “protect the public by declaring a moratorium on the activation of digital content protection capabilities” until the FCC completed an evaluation whether “proposed uses of content protection technologies by MVPDs are in the public interest.”