MVPDs, CVCC Spar in DSTAC Replies

Pay-TV companies and groups still disagree with TiVo and the Consumer Video Choice Coalition over whether the FCC should take action based on the Downloadable Security Technology Advisory Committee report and whether such an action would be legal, said replies in docket 15-64. AT&T, the American Cable Association, MPAA and NCTA believe the FCC would be overstepping congressional intent and its own authority if it tried to implement the downloadable security solution backed by the CVCC.

The CVCC downloadable security proposals are comparable to the failed “AllVid” effort and aren't necessary or feasible “in a marketplace where consumers can access multichannel and online video content on a wide and growing array of apps-based retail devices,” NCTA said. The app-based approach favored by multichannel video programming distributors would further “entrench” their control of the set-top box market, the CVCC said. “Congress did not direct the FCC to convene the Downloadable Security Technology Advisory Committee (DSTAC) merely to engage in a thought exercise that could never be implemented.”

The CVCC-backed proposal is unfinished and not practical, several MVPD industry commenters said. The proposal would “take years of development time and require massive resources and costs that would be ultimately borne by consumers,” AT&T Services said. The CVCC solution is “not vaporware,” CVCC said. Its proposals are not mutually exclusive with the app approach supported by the MVPDs, CVCC said. “In a world with competitive navigation options, consumers will not lose any apps they use today to watch programming on tablets, smartphones, etc. The competitive navigation approach simply provides consumers greater choice among retail navigation devices.”

Because the CVCC proposals would allow retail devices to use their own user interface (UI) and menus with content provided by MVPDs, implementing it would require pay-TV providers to “re-architect their networks so that MVPD service could be disassembled into individual piece parts” without considering the licensing agreements governing that content, NCTA said. CVCC, CCIA and TiVo disagree. Despite TiVo's many years of offering a retail set-top box, with its own UI, "there has been no reordering or repackaging of channels, no substitution of network advertising, no 'disaggregation' of services, no theft of service, no hosting of pirated content, no confusion as to the source of the programming or device,” TiVo said. "None of the worst case scenarios described by NCTA and others have come to pass.”

Many of the industry-side commenters said the FCC doesn't have the authority to implement the CVCC-backed proposal, and Congress never intended that. The language of the Satellite Television Extension and Localism Reauthorization Act doesn't suggest Congress wanted the FCC to take additional steps after the completion of the DSTAC report “or meander into non-security related video issues,” MPAA said. Replacing the UI of MVPDs with a third-party one raises copyright and First Amendment issues, MPAA said.

The DSTAC process and the subsequent report differed significantly from the DSTAC's charter, to the degree that the process doesn't serve as proper notice that the FCC is contemplating a rulemaking, said downloadable security company Beyond Broadband Technology. The process “has resulted in little if any information that truly addresses the DSTAC Charter,” BBT said. The DSTAC committee's composition “preordained” that it would come to no resolution, BBT said. The DSTAC report ignores BBT's “agnostic” downloadable security solution because “neither side” wanted to truly address the questions posed in the DSTAC charter, said the firm.

The DSTAC process is also flawed because it didn't address the issues of rural MVPDs, NTCA said. “No input was sought or received from the small and rural providers of video services." The CVCC-backed solution would be burdensome for smaller cable providers, ACA said. “Small operators that face substantially greater technical and financial challenges than their larger counterparts are especially ill-equipped to deal with these costly challenges.”