The company whose Betamax victory later became embraced as the CE industry’s Magna Carta has quit the Home Recording Rights Coalition (HRRC). Sony Electronics confirmed Thurs. it’s no longer an HRRC member-- a development that CEA Vp- Technology Policy Michael Petricone disclosed during the panel at the Media Summit conference in N.Y. (see separate report, this issue). “As a founding member of the HRRC, Sony Electronics remains committed to protecting consumers’ home recording rights,” the company said in a statement issued in response to our query. “Indeed, this matter is as fundamental to us today as it was when the HRRC was formed more than 20 years ago. That said, Sony Electronics -- like all companies -- has to prioritize resources on such activities. With this in mind, we have decided to re-direct resources toward a timely matter that is critical to our core business and the American consumer, which is obtaining a fair and open standard for bi-directional cable plug-&-play that protects innovation and consumer choice.”
Although content and technology industries may be worlds apart in their interpretation of fair use, there’s broad agreement between CE makers and Hollywood that Congress shouldn’t enact hard definitions of fair use, said panelists at the Media Summit conference Thurs. in N.Y.
Qualifying DTV converter boxes as eligible for govt. subsidy under newly enacted analog TV cutoff legislation (CED Feb 2 p1) will be a central challenge of any NTIA management plan detailing how the agency will promote the availability of low-cost set-tops through $40 vouchers (CED Feb 7 p2).
CE and IT industry efforts to disparage cable’s proposed downloadable conditional access system (DCAS) as infeasible because of its alleged PC-incompatibility or that cable lacks the will to implement it are “inaccurate on both counts,” the NCTA told the FCC Mon. in reply comments.
New releases on Blu-ray from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment (SPHE) will carry a $23.45 wholesale price, while catalog BD titles will be priced at $17.95, the studio announced Tues. SPHE’s BD price structure for catalog titles will be roughly on par with that of its DVD catalog titles, while new releases will have a “slight premium” of about $3 per disc, SPHE Pres. Ben Feingold told us. Firm street dates for SPHE’s first slate of BD titles will be announced in the next day or 2 with an emphasis on hardware collaboration, Feingold said. He said he still subscribes to the belief he stated some years ago that Blu-ray can be introduced through a “big-bang launch” more reminiscent of the high-volume PS2 rollout than the more methodical commercial introduction of DVD in 1997. Feingold said SPHE had hoped to launch its first Blu-ray titles day and date with the rollout of PS3, but it now looks as if Blu-ray will be “slightly ahead” in its introduction. Nevertheless, he disclosed that Sony Computer Entertainment plans high volumes of PS3 in its initial runs, with shipments up to 2 million consoles in the first several weeks. A firm PS3 launch date remains a well- kept secret within Sony, however. In a statement, Feingold said SPHE’s intent “is to create a critical mass of movies and displays at retail that will showcase the escalating availability and abundance of BD software and hardware in the marketplace. Additionally, our plan is to ensure significant availability of BD titles to all retailers carrying BD hardware.” SPHE said at CES it plans 4 catalog titles per month at launch, ramping to 10 per month by 4th quarter. SPHE has announced a slate of 18 catalog titles, including 5 from the MGM vault. New release titles planned from SPHE include Underworld: Evolution, slated for an early summer release. SPHE has said 2 of its catalog titles will use dual-layer 50-GB BD discs. Feingold told us his hope is to price them the same as single-layer 25-GB catalog titles, but no final decision has been made.
Despite the staff shakeup last Fri. at Sound & Vision that saw the departure of chief editor Bob Ankosko and 3 others (CED Feb 6 p10), the magazine will continue print publication even as it sheds circulation and expands the role of its website, Consumer Electronics Daily learned. Nothing was disclosed Mon. about replacements for most of the S&V editors dismissed or about their severance agreements; queries to new Editor-in-Chief Mike Mettler weren’t returned. Mettler replaced Ankosko, a 17-year veteran of parent Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S. who had been chief editor of S&V predecessor Stereo Review. S&V made its debut at CES in 1999, merging the 40-year-old Stereo Review and 20-year-old Video magazine. Others dismissed Fri. were Managing Editor David Klein, Technology Editor Michael Antonoff and Art Dir. Laura Sutcliffe. David Ranada remains technical editor but was removed from the staff to become a contractor. S&V will continue publishing its print edition the current 10 times yearly but shift resources toward its website, HFMUS CEO Jack Kliger said in a written statement. The publication will move from the publisher’s Entertainment Group to its Enthusiast Group, which includes the magazines American Photo, Boating, Flying and Popular Photography. There was no comment Mon. on S&V’s print circulation, listed at about 400,000 paid as of Dec. 2004 but scheduled to be halved by the end of 2005, according to a plan announced by Kliger in Nov. Fifty thousand subscribers were cut during the summer, sources told us. Kliger also announced plans in Nov. to raise the cover price to $4.95 from $4.50 and double the subscription rate to $20 yearly. S&V claims a 2.2 million audience. The Nov. plan called for expanding S&V’s website with daily updates, and doubling to 80 the markets where its Sat. morning radio program airs.
The FCC shouldn’t “underestimate the massive challenge” faced by CE makers and cable operators in ensuring that a 2- way interactive Digital Cable Ready (iDCR) system based on OpenCable Application Platform (OCAP) specs not only works as promised, but doesn’t crash TVs, Sony Electronics said in a letter to the Commission. “Such problems result from the pervasiveness of OCAP in the host device, and the complexity of testing the almost infinite number of combinations of device hardware, device software, OCAP middleware implementations, MSO headend hardware, and downloadable OCAP applications,” Sony said. It said it’s “deeply concerned that the OCAP approach will be incapable of scaling beyond application to cable’s own leased set-top boxes. The cable industry’s resistance to solving the application/receiver testing challenges is evidence of this.” Neither cable nor CE disputes that OCAP, as envisioned, “will manage all of the functionality of the host device when that device is legally receiving and displaying cable programming,” Sony said. “In short, when a consumer inserts a CableCARD or, presumably, attaches the device to a system having software downloadable security, OCAP will become the intelligence of the CE product and the ‘face’ of the product to the consumer.” If an MSO’s downloaded OCAP guide application fails in a device, “the consumer will lose entirely the ability to receive and display cable programming with that device, notwithstanding the consumer’s legal entitlement to receive that programming,” Sony said. “In short, meeting consumer expectations about adequate device operation in an OCAP world presents a significant, perhaps insurmountable, problem for CE manufacturers and cable providers.” Sony said the task for CE and cable is to develop a testing regimen “sufficiently robust to manage this risk and complexity.” But no such agreement has been reached, Sony said. In a joint response, CableLabs and NCTA said they've explained many times to CE manufacturers and the FCC that CE makers shouldn’t face any “control” problem with OCAP, let alone one that’s “insurmountable… This is evidenced by the CE manufacturers who have agreed to use OCAP in their 2-way devices, including Samsung, whose two-way digital cable ready DTV was shown at this year’s CES… In fact, OCAP is based on the European MHP standard and Sony’s MHP boxes are deployed in Europe today.” OCAP doesn’t give cable “pervasive control of product functionality,” as Sony alleges, “only control over the cable service we are providing to cable subscribers… Until Sony’s filing, we had thought that we were in productive private discussions about a workable testing regime,” CableLabs and NCTA said: “We are disappointed that Sony has chosen to suggest otherwise with mischaracterizations and exaggerations that are designed for dramatic effect, rather than to advance the process.”
CE and other industries may well bear a large burden for educating the public about the Feb. 17, 2009, analog TV cutoff, now that the House has narrowly approved a deficit- reduction package and its DTV provisions and sent it to the White House for President Bush’s signature (CED Feb 2 p1). But for the CE industry and others, for which enactment of a hard DTV transition date is a long-sought victory, the burden is one they're ready to shoulder.
Better-than-expected performance in many of its core businesses spurred Toshiba to announce Tues. upgrades of all sales and profit forecasts for the fiscal year ending March 31. Toshiba raised its net income projection 18% from its April 2005 forecast to Yen 65 billion, on sales of Yen 6.3 trillion -- Yen 300 billion higher than its previous projection.
Despite “the animated rhetoric of pleadings” filed at the FCC in late Nov. on the progress of negotiations over bidirectional CableCARDs (CED Dec 2 p1), “the cable and consumer electronics industries continue to meet and work with each other,” NCTA told the Commission on Mon. in its latest update on the talks. Besides getting together Dec. 8 and Jan. 17 to discuss business and technical issues on 2-way plug & play, NCTA said, cable and CE have continued engineering discussions on “how device resources can be shared practically between cable and applications and other applications” of a bidirectional CableCARD product. Those talks have addressed several “use cases” that may arise as issues in different generations of interactive DTVs, NCTA said. It said the issues discussed include: (1) How to tune to terrestrial channels using an 8-VSB tuner while cable services are running. (2) How functions such as volume and color controls and PIP might appear. (3) Which remote control keys should be reserved for specific functions. The talks, which include weekly conference calls and more in- depth meetings face to face, aim at developing “engineering change requests” (ECRs) for submission to CableLabs “as may be needed to improve, clarify and adjust” the OpenCable Application Platform (OCAP) specs, NCTA said. In a separate filing, CEA concurred that cable and CE met in Dec. and Jan., saying it was mainly to discuss OCAP testing. At the most recent meeting, CEA said, “cable proposed being able to launch new applications on their leased devices without any required testing and then submitting them for testing on competitive entrant devices -- with no mechanism to assure that the applications would ever run properly (or be fixed to run properly within a reasonable time) on those competitive devices. The CE side found this approach unsatisfactory, and further discussions on this subject are already scheduled.” Even so, cable and CE “have come a long way in the inter- industry process to achieve a mutual appreciation of the dimensions of the problem posed by the testing of OCAP applications,” CEA said: “In particular, an inadequately tested ‘unbound’ application, whose function is not limited to a particular program or channel, could threaten the essential functions and viability of a DTV receiver that represents one of a family’s larger investments. This case is especially problematic when faulty operation, resulting from a faulty application downloaded by the cable provider without the consent or knowledge of the consumer, has the potential to impair or disable the functionality of the consumer’s DTV receiver. Yet it is these applications, in particular, which the cable group proposes to put into commercial release after testing only on proprietary set-top boxes, with no intent to test these critical applications on competitive entrant devices.” CEA said cable acknowledges the need for such testing, but only after commercial deployment may occur.