Despite ’the animated rhetoric of pleadings’ filed at the FCC in ...

NCTA told the Commission on Mon. in its latest update on the talks. Besides getting together Dec. 8 and Jan. 17 to discuss business and technical issues on 2-way plug & play, NCTA said, cable and CE have continued engineering discussions on “how device resources can be shared practically between cable and applications and other applications” of a bidirectional CableCARD product. Those talks have addressed several “use cases” that may arise as issues in different generations of interactive DTVs, NCTA said. It said the issues discussed include: (1) How to tune to terrestrial channels using an 8-VSB tuner while cable services are running. (2) How functions such as volume and color controls and PIP might appear. (3) Which remote control keys should be reserved for specific functions. The talks, which include weekly conference calls and more in- depth meetings face to face, aim at developing “engineering change requests” (ECRs) for submission to CableLabs “as may be needed to improve, clarify and adjust” the OpenCable Application Platform (OCAP) specs, NCTA said. In a separate filing CEA concurred that cable and CE met in Dec. and Jan. mainly to discuss OCAP testing. At the most recent meeting, CEA said, “cable proposed being able to launch new applications on their leased devices without any required testing and then submitting them for testing on competitive entrant devices -- with no mechanism to assure that the applications would ever run properly (or be fixed to run properly within a reasonable time) on those competitive devices. The CE side found this approach unsatisfactory, and further discussions on this subject are already scheduled.” Even so, cable and CE “have come a long way in the inter- industry process to achieve a mutual appreciation of the dimensions of the problem posed by the testing of OCAP applications,” CEA said: “In particular, an inadequately tested ‘unbound’ application, whose function is not limited to a particular program or channel, could threaten the essential functions and viability of a DTV receiver that represents one of a family’s larger investments. This case is especially problematic when faulty operation, resulting from a faulty application downloaded by the cable provider without the consent or knowledge of the consumer, has the potential to impair or disable the functionality of the consumer’s DTV receiver. Yet it is these applications, in particular, which the cable group proposes to put into commercial release after testing only on proprietary set-top boxes, with no intent to test these critical applications on competitive entrant devices.” CEA said cable acknowledges the need for such testing, but only after commercial deployment may occur.