CABLE, CE SPLIT ON PROLONGING BAN ON INTEGRATED SET-TOP SECURITY
“The time has now come” for the FCC to eliminate its longstanding ban on integrated security in set-top boxes because “the underlying rationales for the ban no longer exist,” NCTA told the Commission in comments filed last week. However, the CEA, cable’s harmonious partner in plug-&-play, told the FCC that although there has been “substantial progress” made in cable-CE relations since Dec. 2002 when the industries drafted their plug-&-play memorandum of understanding, “the reliance on a common security interface is a keystone for continued progress in the future.”
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NCTA said the progress sought by the FCC in developing a competitive retail market for cable set-tops “is rapidly occurring.” It said the “record shows” that maintaining the integration ban “limits consumer choice and imposes unnecessary additional costs” on cable operators and consumers. Moreover, it’s “unfair and unsound public policy” to continue imposing the ban on MSOs facing “vigorous competition” from DirecTV and EchoStar, which aren’t subject to the same security rules “and have complete control over the manufacture, sale and distribution of their customer equipment,” NCTA said.
The FCC’s endorsement of plug-&-play and “its adoption of implementing rules with the force of law eliminates any doubt as to cable’s commitment to a retail market and to making retail navigation devices work on their systems,” NCTA said. Those developments “obviate the need for the costly, consumer-unfriendly ban which arguably served that purpose,” it said. As proof that the ban had outlived its usefulness in breeding a competitive retail market for cable products, the NCTA said, major CE companies like Panasonic, Pioneer and Samsung showed “POD"-enabled unidirectional digital cable- ready products at the recent CES in Las Vegas.
Moreover, it said, Motorola has begun shipping CableCARDs to MSOs and plans to launch several CableCARD- enabled products this year, including set-tops that support HDTV and PVR functionality. “The emergence and deployment of these CableCARD-enabled products concretely demonstrates the commitment of both the cable and consumer electronics industries to speed the deployment of new digital cable-ready products at retail,” the NCTA said.
However, CEA and the Consumer Electronics Retailers Coalition (CERC), with which it’s closely affiliated, said it feared “breaking the common security link” in set-tops would require that “an apology and consumer caution attach to every new DTV and HDTV multipurpose device or display product,” and that hardly would be consumer-friendly. Even when POD production reaches sufficient economies of scale to “drive down costs and spur other manufacturing and packaging innovations,” CEA and CERC said, “POD design itself cannot remain static without consigning POD-reliant devices to backwater status.”
Every new innovation will require intensive work on designing and debugging devices to be sure they're POD- compatible, CEA and CERC said: “If such attention is apportioned to the POD by companies not planning to rely on PODs in their own products or on PODs to carry their own programming or services, this work cannot receive the necessary resources or priority.” “The Commission had it right in 1998 and 1999” when it imposed the integration ban, CEA and CERC said. The FCC then wisely found “it is better to give MSOs a business incentive to support a technology by ensuring they must rely upon it in their own devices than to attempt to keep the technology available and functional through regulation,” the CE groups said.