TiVo Asks FCC to Waive Analog Tuner Requirement for New DVR
The FCC should waive a requirement that retail cable set-top boxes include an analog tuner for its new device that TiVo called Premiere Elite and it plans to sell, the company said in a waiver request this week. TiVo said it’s taking orders for a different version of the device called the Premiere Q from cable operators who will begin deploying it later this year. It wants to sell the Elite box at retail with a larger hard drive, and for that it will need a waiver of the commission’s “Digital Cable Ready” (DCR) certification, marketing and labeling rules, to license CableLabs’ CableCARD technology, it said. Under those rules, such one-way cable products can’t be certified as digital cable-ready without including an analog tuner.
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Both new TiVo boxes would have four QAM tuners for digital cable signals, no ATSC tuner and no analog cable tuner, said Matt Zinn, TiVo general counsel. The company plans to show the Premiere Q at the Cable Show in Chicago next week, he said. TiVo won’t stop selling its other Premiere boxes, Zinn said. It wants to add the new product to certain retail channels as well, he said. “We can’t go to CableLabs and ask them to certify this because it doesn’t comply with FCC rules,” he said. “Their hands are tied. Our hands are tied. And the only one who can untie everyone’s hands is the FCC."
Requiring an analog tuner would add $80-$100 to the retail price of the box, and increase the device’s size and energy consumption, TiVo said in the waiver request. Such requirements are increasingly becoming obsolete as cable operators move to all-digital systems, TiVo said. Several operators have upgraded to all-digital service and others simulcast all their analog programming in digital, TiVo said. “Only a small and dwindling number of the potential customers for UDCPs [unidirectional cable products] receive analog programming at all,” it said. “Requiring an analog tuner in every UDCP is no longer necessary or desirable."
TiVo’s prospective customers probably won’t want an analog tuner, the company said. “To the contrary, TiVo’s generally tech-savvy customers would be more likely to view analog functionality as a quaint relic rather than as a necessary component of a device’s capabilities."
TiVo said it will market the new box mainly to customers that already subscribe to cable systems that offer all their services in digital. To avoid customer confusion, it will market the boxes primarily through its custom installation, high-end retail and TiVo.com sales channels, it said. It will have “clear and easily understood point of sale disclosures and retailer scripts” to make sure consumers understand what they're buying, the company said. If a customer on an analog cable system ends up with the box, TiVo will exchange it for one that includes analog functionality, it said. Without a waiver, TiVo said it will still sell the boxes to cable operators to be leased to their subscribers, “and no retail competition will occur in the reasonably foreseeable future in this new and growing segment of the set-top box market.”