Downloadable Committee Conflict Over Scope Continues To Dominate

The FCC needs to better define the goal of the Downloadable Technical Advisory Committee, several DSTAC members said at Tuesday’s meeting. They echoed a letter sent by several multichannel video programming distributors to DSTAC Chairwoman Cheryl Tritt earlier this month (see 1504160051).

It’s not clear how much progress the group can make toward producing a report by the congressionally mandated Sept. 4 deadline, “until we know what the goal is,” said Samsung Senior Vice President-Public Policy John Godfrey. Though Tuesday’s meeting was meant to focus on reports from working groups tasked to analyze requirements for downloadable security solutions and possible security threats, the meeting showed continuing stratification between MVPD interests that want the committee to produce a narrowly defined security solution and members that want to make sure the group’s report leaves room for viable retail competition in the set-top box market, such as TiVo and Public Knowledge. The group’s downloadable security result should give third-party, non-MVPD manufacturers the ability to offer differentiated products, Public Knowledge Senior Staff Attorney John Bergmayer has told us.

The FCC representative on the DSTAC, Brendan Murray, declined to comment on the meeting, as did a Media Bureau spokeswoman. Tritt also declined to comment.

Though the MVPD letter asking Tritt and the FCC to more narrowly define the DSTAC’s scope wasn’t directly referenced at the meeting, it heard a brief presentation from Paula Silberthau, an attorney associate from the Office of General Counsel, on the proper way to communicate without breaching public notice rules. Since the letter to Tritt was signed by only eight of the groups’ 18 members, it doesn’t constitute a quorum or violate notice procedures, but communications involving a simple majority of the DSTAC could be considered deliberations, Silberthau told us.

The divide over the group’s scope is making it difficult for working groups to do their jobs, Godfrey said. He was part of a DSTAC working group with the aim of listing the available technology, “but a huge amount of time was spent on how that technology relates to the goal of this project,” Godfrey said. “People had different ideas about that goal.” The DSTAC and the FCC need to define that goal, he said.

Congress has narrowly defined DTSAC’s goal, said NCTA General Counsel Neal Goldberg in the meeting’s public comment phase. “The FCC staff has to make a decision sooner rather than later.”

Conflicts at Tuesday’s meeting also arose over whether the DSTAC’s solution should encompass over-the-top services. OTT offerings were being “dragged” into a discussion where they don’t belong, said Amazon engineer Matthew Chaboud. OTT offerings are “fundamentally different” from MVPD services, Chaboud said. Comcast’s Senior Vice President Industry Affairs Mark Hess, who has supported including OTT services, said the issue was one the DSTAC would have to “wrestle with.”