CEOs Push OpenCable
Roberts, Britt Urge FCC to Scuttle CEA Proposal
By Todd Spangler -- Multichannel News, 11/4/2007 5:00:00 PM MT
In separate meetings last month, the top executives of the country’s two largest cable companies urged Federal Communications Commission chairman Kevin Martin to reject a proposal from consumer-electronics manufacturers for letting TVs access interactive cable services and to instead adopt the cable industry’s own plan.
Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, in a solid day of meetings Oct. 26, delivered presentations to Martin and the FCC’s four other commissioners to lobby for the OpenCable Platform, a middleware technology developed by CableLabs for standardizing the way “two-way” applications communicate with cable headends.
Roberts and his staff “stressed that America’s cable industry is committed to OpenCable” and that the technology has the support of “leading” consumer-electronics companies, according to a Comcast ex parte filing last Monday.
DUELING PROPOSALS
The rare face-to-face between Roberts and Martin came after Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt met with Martin and FCC commissioners Jonathan Adelstein and Michael Copps on Oct. 24, also to promote OpenCable over the consumer-electronics industry’s competing proposal.
Cable-industry lobbyists said the FCC may issue a decision on the two-way cable proposals as early as this month.
With the CEO campaign, cable hopes to convince the FCC that OpenCable is the only viable technology for providing third-party electronic devices access to cable’s interactive services, such as video-on-demand and interactive program guides, before the government-mandated digital TV transition in February 2009.
The Consumer Electronics Association has pushed a proposal referred to as DCR Plus (“digital cable ready plus”) that would specify protocols for VOD and other individual applications.
According to operators, if the FCC required the cable industry to support DCR Plus, it would cost several hundred million dollars and stifle development of two-way services not specified by DCR Plus, such as caller ID on the TV. According to comments filed with the FCC by the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, developing DCR Plus would take “years of standards body and intellectual property turmoil.”
But the CEA, for its part, has asserted in FCC filings that competitive DCR Plus products would include other innovations “above and beyond those supported or allowed” via OpenCable, such as Internet-downloaded video content.
Roberts and the Comcast team — which included senior vice president of strategic planning Mark Coblitz and chief policy adviser for FCC and regulatory policy James Coltharp — noted that with the DCR Plus proposal, “CEA is asking the FCC to micromanage technology choices for cable in a way it has never done for any industry.”
The CEA, in FCC filings, has argued that consumer-electronics manufacturers have been reluctant “to bank on promises of [OpenCable] support that, five years later, still have not come to fruition.” The association also claims that creating the elements of DCR Plus should be “straightforward and implementable.”
The NCTA has responded that “a DCR Plus device would be obsolete even before it rolls off the assembly line and would likely fail in the marketplace,” because it would be unable to access newer features like caller ID on the TV and interactive games.
Ultimately, cable operators back an “all-MVPD” approach, which would provide a way for CE devices to access interactive services from any multichannel video programming distributor (i.e., cable, satellite or telco).
OPENCABLE DEPLOYED
In the meantime, major cable operators, including Comcast, Cox Communications, Time Warner Cable, Cablevision Systems and Bright House Networks, have pledged to have OpenCable widely supported by the end of 2008. Time Warner Cable claims to have already deployed 150,000 OpenCable-based set-top boxes in 13 divisions.
Consumer electronics companies that are developing or have delivered OpenCable-compatible products include LG Electronics, Panasonic, Samsung Electronics, Toshiba and Intel.
