Cable, CE Far Apart On How Best to Deploy 2-Way CableCARDs
Differences overshadow agreements between the cable and CE industries on how best to deploy bidirectional CableCARDs. That was evident from reams of CEA and NCTA filings at the FCC Wed. One of the sharpest points of discord involves cable’s proposal for deployment of downloadable security, which cable committed in a separate report at the Commission to roll out nationally by July 1, 2008, in cable set-tops and in converter boxes to be sold at retail. CEA pledged it will continue to oppose any downloadable security proposal “that has the effect of delaying” the integration ban beyond July 1, 2007, the date set by the FCC in its last deadline extension.
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Cable’s proposed 2-way CableCARD devices include specs and license agreements developed by CableLabs and “commercially accepted,” NCTA said. The proposal builds on “voluntary market-based agreements” on OCAP and CHILA already reached between CableLabs and several CE makers for the production of “interactive digital cable ready” devices (IDCRs), NCTA said: “These agreements allow retail devices and interactive applications to be portable so they can work on cable systems across the country.”
The largest MSOs have committed to launching OCAP beginning in 2006, NCTA said. It said its proposal to the FCC “includes unprecedented voluntary benchmarks to which the cable industry has committed,” including the deployment of OCAP in all cable headends by July 1, 2009. “The cable industry is committing to deploy OCAP over a 3- year period to give assurances” to CE makers that TV sets or other IDCRS built to OCAP or OpenCable specs “will work nationwide,” NCTA said.
But CEA denounced the proposal on several grounds. OCAP “was not designed or developed so as to support multifunction devices with non-cable related features,” CEA said. The present version of OCAP -- designed for set-top boxes (STBs) and TVs that act as STBs -- “presents significant technical challenges for any device that contains functions in addition to cable service,” CEA said. The approach “is simply not acceptable for competition” in CE or IT devices, it said.
OCAP “provides for the exclusive access and control by the cable system operator to download through the cable plant and insert application software into the consumer- owned competitive navigation device,” CEA said. Such applications “can take control of product resources and disable applications that are part of the product or were installed by the owner,” it said: “Arbitration of resources is a critical issue, among others, in the ongoing discussions of how OCAP might be altered to make it implementable in a multi-function CE device. In a competitive product, access to the screen, graphics generator, tuner, memory, remote controls, storage, and other components will potentially come into contention between cable services and any non-cable services.” Even with modifications to OCAP, CEA said, MSOs “have shown reluctance to allow any changes which would result in devices not presenting interactive cable services in exactly the same way, in every detail, as a cable operator-supplied STB.”
By contrast, CEA said CE believes the goal in supporting competitive products “is to offer consumers a better-integrated experience, bridging both their cable and non-cable services in a single device, rather than aiming simply to copy the dedicated functioning of leased STBs that are, at best, one of several external inputs to a TV, personal computer or other multifunction consumer device.” In the multi-industry talks on bidirectional plug & play, “efforts to achieve this result have run headlong into the cable objective of presentation of all interactive services by relegating the consumer-owned multifunction navigation device to the same functionality as the cable operator’s leased device,” CEA said.