Cardenas, Long Outline Concerns About Set-Top Order

Two members of the House Commerce Committee questioned the merits of the FCC's set-top box order now on circulation (see 1609130064), one Democrat and one Republican. "I still have concerns with this most recent iteration, particularly the licensing body and development of a standard license," said Rep. Tony Cardenas, D-Calif., citing multiple productive conversations with FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler on the issue. "Agreements between programmers and pay-TV providers are exhaustive and complex, and do not stop at channel placement or permissions. The FCC should release the text of the recent proposal with enough time for the public, consumer groups and industry stakeholders to sufficiently review the proposal before a vote by the Commission." Rep. Billy Long, R-Mo., also said he's "very concerned about the FCC’s set-top box proposal in relation to copyright protections and privately negotiated licenses. The FCC is proposing a massive new bureaucratic intrusion that threatens innovation, mobile viewing and exposes every consumer’s viewing habits to data mining." The requirement for multichannel video programming distributors to design an app for all devices "will require a huge amount of time, engineering and cost for MVPDs to meet, especially when considering there was a simple, efficient cost effective alternative put forward by the industry; namely building apps for an open standard HTML-5 platform," Long said. "Instead they now have to customize Apps with functionality that they may not even have developed." The agency has said the order would respect copyright and accounts for other issues (see 1609080085).