Cable Executives Visit Eight Floor to Talk Plug-and-Play
Executives of the two largest cable operators visited FCC offices this week to discuss the commission’s two-way plug-and-play rulemaking with aides to Commissioners Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein. Mark Coblitz, Comcast senior vice president of strategic planning, and Kevin Leddy, Time Warner Cable senior vice president of strategy and development, toured the Democratic commissioners’ offices with NCTA officials, ex parte filings show. The pair also talked up to reporters this week cable’s OpenCable Application Platform as a two-way solution and their proposal for an “all pay-TV” solution and discussed their concerns about CEA’s proposed Digital Cable Ready Plus proposal.
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Cable officials worry that they're headed for a rerun of the unidirectional plug-and-play talks, Coblitz and Comcast said. Those negotiations between cable and consumer electronics companies led to the existing batch of digital cable ready TV sets and PVRs that can’t access advanced cable services like VoD and switched digital video. “It looks from a marketing standpoint very much like what happened in the unidirectional process,” Leddy said. “Consumers will see [these products] at retail and they will understand that they're limited capability devices.” And they won’t want to buy them, he said.
Adopting DCR+ would also impose huge costs on cable operators that would have to rewrite much of the software they use to run their networks, Coblitz said. Large cable operators have committed to deploying OPAC next year and Comcast expects to have it fully rolled out by the end of 2008. Adding in support for DCR+ devices would double their work. “We really don’t know how we would do both,” Time Warner’s Leddy said.
Last week Panasonic officials showed off three types of OCAP-enabled device prototypes to FCC staff, an ex parte shows. The company, which has licensed OCAP and plans to market OCAP devices, also raised concerns it has with the DCR+ proposal. “Cable operators do not have unlimited technical and other resources,” Panasonic said. Forcing cable operators to support both OCAP and DCR+ would probably “hamper the continued rollout of OCAP,” it said.
Meanwhile, CEA officials met with an aide to Copps and with Media Bureau Chief Monica Desai Tuesday, said Julie Kearney, CEA regulatory counsel. “The commission had said they wanted to act quickly so we're all mindful of making sure the commission has all the information they need to make a decision,” she said.
Cable officials also promoted their plan to develop a device that would let consumers connect their digital cable- ready products to any pay-TV system, even those run by competing phone and satellite operators. The idea is that each pay-TV company would lease a small box that could be fixed to the back of a TV set and would act as a gateway to the service provider’s network. Under this “all MPVD” plan, navigation functions would still be controlled through the digital TV set. Each multichannel video programming distributor would lease unique devices to subscribers, but every device would have common outputs. “We think the only way consumers will buy is if these devices work on all networks,” Leddy said. “We are not trying to get other MVPDs to use our middleware.”
The CEA is skeptical. “It’s called a set-back device and it sets back any progress we've had in years,” Kearney said. Judging by cable’s track record with OCAP -- it first put the technology on a “fast track” in 1997 -- such a system wouldn’t be ready for years, Kearney said. Cable officials said the all-MVPD plan could be deployed sooner than DCR+.