FCC Has ‘Stark’ Choice on Two-Way Plug-&-Play, CEA Says

CEA said the FCC faces a “stark” choice between a CE industry proposal that makes OCAP optional and promotes “consumer sovereignty and innovation from unexpected quarters” and a flawed cable approach that wouldn’t accomplish those ends. But NCTA, sticking to its guns, said mandatory OCAP “is the only clear and practical path for achieving retail availability of bidirectional digital cable devices in time for the broadcast digital transition.” OCAP is the only solution on which “committed” CE makers, cable companies and content suppliers agree, NCTA said.

“One would think” from reading cable’s comments that CEA was trying to restrict OCAP development and licensing, CEA said. “To the contrary, it is CEA’s draft regulations, and not NCTA’s, that include metrics for the assured rollout and interoperability of, and reliance by cable operators on, OCAP,” CEA said. The FCC’s choice isn’t between OCAP and CE’s “DCR+” proposal, CEA said. “The choice, rather, is whether the Commission will define away its obligation to the Congress, consumers, and competition by effectively doing nothing; or will enact regulations that enable real competition, and require the cable industry to respect regulations, as to licensing, that the Commission adopted a decade ago.”

But NCTA called DCR+ flawed because it pursues advantages “for some CE manufacturers at the expense of consumers, content providers and the cable industry.” DCR+ is a “disruptive and misleading effort to dictate technical standards for cable operators,” it said. Even in the unlikely event that CEA’s plan could promote the retail availability of two-way plug-and-play devices in 17 months, as the FCC seeks, “it would retard innovation in the network, services and applications, and even in CE equipment, and would lead to massive consumer confusion and a loss of access to cable services that consumers expect to receive,” NCTA said.

Panasonic and Sony in their replies again came down on opposite sides of the fence. Panasonic sided with NCTA, Sony with CEA. “It is Panasonic’s strong belief that an industry- wide agreement based on OCAP common reliance would provide significant benefits to consumers,” the company said. “Panasonic urges the Commission to use its considerable influence to encourage the parties to reach such an agreement quickly or to impose the Commission’s own compromise requirements should agreement not be reached.”

But Sony called the OCAP “regime” at the heart of the NCTA proposal “flawed” in four ways. An OCAP requirement won’t create a competitive market for two-way plug-and-play devices as Congress has required, the company said. It also will harm consumers “because it ties all currently and subsequently available cable services into a single, non- severable bundle,” Sony said. The proposal fails to embrace the principle of “common reliance,” it said. Worse, it asks the Commission to “abdicate its statutory responsibility” without oversight to CableLabs, “a private and self- interested entity,” Sony said.

MPAA thinks content marketing decisions “should be left to content providers to determine in response to market forces,” not determined by FCC rules, it told the Commission. “Just as CE manufacturers would not expect governmental regulations to determine how their products should be marketed, content providers expect to have discretion, unfettered by unreasonable governmental regulations, to determine the usage model, level of protection, and other aspects of marketing their proprietary content.

MPAA urged the Commission to reject DCR+ because it “still fails to adequately address content creators’ reasonable concerns regarding content protection, presentation and interactivity,” it said. On content protection, CEA’s proposal doesn’t include specifications for a redistribution control trigger, extended copy control information, selectable output control or system renewability messaging carriage and processing, MPAA said. Those features are included in OCAP, it said.

But the Commission should reject NCTA and MPAA requests “to give them unfettered and minute control over the functionality of receiving devices through selectable output control, downresolution, redistribution control and revocability,” the Home Recording Rights Coalition said. “Up is down, says the MPAA,” according to HRRC, and it’s “bizarre” to argue that consumers will benefit from cable operators’ ability to disable at will devices that consumers have bought and functions on them. “The Commission should reject this absurdity and continue its careful regulation of technological use restrictions,” HRRC said.

“Betraying consumers” by allowing cable operators to disable equipment already in consumers’ homes poses a greater threat to an orderly DTV transition “than continued Commission oversight of use-restriction protocols,” HRRC said. “To abolish encoding rules would be to punish early adopters of high definition and digital receivers - consumers who, like the early purchasers of VCRs, are driving demand and creating economies that will benefit all of the industries involved.” It also would “set the stage for future consumer harm” when a cable operator “makes the unilateral decision to disable particular outputs or functions,” HRRC said.