FCC Effectively Pauses on AllVid, Wants More CE-MVPD Deals
The FCC has effectively paused its AllVid proceeding, holding off finishing a rulemaking notice proposing to make all multichannel video programming distributors connect to consumer electronics sold at retail, said agency and industry officials watching the work. In what represents another new approach to the proceeding, industry officials said the Media Bureau and office of Chairman Julius Genachowski seem content for now to let CE companies and pay-TV providers work out more deals to integrate programming and Internet connectivity with various devices. That new approach was on display last week at the Cable Show, in public comments from bureau Chief Bill Lake and Genachowski aide Sherrese Smith, said CE and cable officials who heard those remarks.
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The changed tone of FCC remarks on AllVid came after the bureau backtracked on a newer proposal it floated, to let CE devices connect to MVPDs’ Internet Protocol streams using application programming interfaces, an alternative to using gateway connectors (WID May 24 p4). A future rulemaking notice likely still will seek to mandate gateway use, but without another approach to also propose in the same document, the bureau may be holding off finishing the item, industry officials said. FCC and industry officials said the bureau also appears to have other priorities at the moment, including implementing various laws including the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act. A bureau spokeswoman declined to comment.
The bureau appears to hope that more companies strike video integration deals, along the lines of recent pacts unveiled last week at NCTA’s annual show in Chicago, so that a more competitive market for video devices provided by companies other than MVPDs will develop, CE and cable officials said. Some said that if more such pacts are made and they result in products being widely rolled out and many pay-TV subscribers can buy them, the bureau may continue waiting to release the rulemaking. The specter of the FCC issuing a rulemaking, which has been opposed by many MVPDs and cable programmers, may spur those firms to enter more deals to avoid AllVid rules, some officials from those industries said. Representatives of the NCTA and CEA declined to comment.
Lake and Smith offered what some who heard them speak said amounted to guidance to MVPDs, to prompt them to enter into more arrangements for their services to connect to a wider array of devices without using CableCARDs. “Many of the things we're seeing on the floor and in the industry are moves in the right direction,” Lake said last Wednesday at the Cable Show. He saw the beginning of an “app world on interconnected TVs,” with two cable operators planning to develop apps to access their services on Samsung TVs, Lake said. “We're very interested to see whether that development” and others “will end up being a limited one or whether it might generalize,” he said. He hopes it will, where pay-TV apps are as “vigorous” as “the apps worlds are for tablets, and for smartphones."
"If a vigorous apps world developed there, with multiple MVPDs being available on multiple brands of TV sets, that might be … a move in the direction of the kinds of the objectives that we've identified in the AllVid world,” Lake said on a panel. “We haven’t seen all of that yet. What we see are some interesting beginnings, and I think it’s still very open in our minds whether the marketplace will be moving as completely and as quickly as we think it should” and as Section 629 of the Telecom Act calls for, he said: “Or whether there is a need for some further government action to help move it in the right direction."
"Keep doing what you're doing” is the message, said a cable lawyer. The bureau may believe it’s better to see what voluntarily develops, rather than trying to get MVPDs to do something they don’t want, the attorney speculated. Although the AllVid rulemaking seems sidelined, there have been no indications Genachowski wants to abandon it entirely, said cable, CE and FCC officials. For now, they said there doesn’t seem to be momentum to get the rulemaking released.
"They're finding out slowly that this wouldn’t succeed,” because of technical and other problems to implementing AllVid regulations, cable lawyer Steve Effros said of the FCC. “They're trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist” and “it’s hard to decide what way to go” with an AllVid rulemaking, because of the various approaches to video device integration from the likes of Comcast, Sony, Time Warner Cable and Verizon, Effros said. He’s a consultant to Beyond Broadband Technology, which has lobbied the commission on AllVid. At NCTA’s show, which he attended, “there are a lot of options out there, and you couldn’t help but see that on the floor,” Effros said.
There’s been little lobbying at the FCC on AllVid recently, commission and industry officials said. Cox Communications was the last company to report lobbying, saying in a May 25 filing in docket 10-91 that it remained “concerned that all-vid regulation would freeze innovation at a set point in the evolution of video services.” Meetings don’t need to be reported, because ex parte disclosure rules don’t apply to the proceeding. A coalition representing several CE and Internet companies was set to have visited the eighth floor on Wednesday, agency and industry officials said. The AllVid Tech Company Alliance has listed Best Buy, Google, Intel, Nagravision, Sony and TiVo as members. A lawyer for the alliance had no comment, nor did the members we contacted, including SageTV, which is being purchased by Google. Such companies have been seeking the issuance of a rulemaking, and the CEA has said it’s disappointed that one hasn’t already been issued.