Momentum Rising for MVPD Set-Top Plan
FCC questions about the pay-TV set-top proposal (see 1607110042), a spate of recent ex parte meetings on the subject and blog posts Tuesday from Incompas CEO Chip Pickering and from Verizon acknowledging the compromise plan are seen as indications the agency is increasingly moving in that direction, industry officials and attorneys on both sides told us Tuesday. Pickering's post offered a kind of counter-proposal to the multichannel video programming distributor plan. He said in an interview Tuesday it's a positive sign the two sides have reached the point where they are going back and forth on details of a proposed plan.
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“You are beginning to see dialogue among the stakeholders, not just at the commission,” Pickering said. He contrasted the state of the debate with the way it was during meetings of the Downloadable Security Technology Advisory Committee, when there was just “opposition” on the MVPD side. Set-tops also were a major topic at Tuesday's House Communications Subcommittee FCC oversight hearing (see 1607120078).
Questions the FCC asked about the pay-TV plan don't rise to the level of an endorsement, but indicate the commission is amenable to some basic tenets of the MVPD plan, such as the use of an HTML5 standard and licensing agreements, proponents of the plan told us. Those questions were part of a long series of ex parte meetings on the compromise plan, which officials on the pay-TV side see as a positive sign. “They are spending a lot of time on it,” one pay-TV official said.
In a blog post Tuesday, Verizon Senior Vice President-Federal Regulatory Will Johnson endorsed the MVPD proposal as a starting point for negotiations. “We need to understand the details, but we believe this proposal represents a serious effort toward compromise and a promising step forward,” he said. The pay-TV proposal has an open standard, supports third-party search, and prevents third-party box makers from imposing fees on distributors or consumers, Johnson said. “This approach has promise.”
Pickering said he is “encouraged” by the back and forth, but his blog post took issue with several aspects of the distributors' plan. The proposal won't allow third-party set-top makers to innovate with user interfaces since each app will have its own user interface, he said. He said it's not clear the MVPD plan would allow DVR functionality on the third-party set-tops, or how the plan would be enforced. A proposal similar to the MVPD plan that included DVR, interoperability, enforceable rules and “an open and independent user interface” would accomplish the goals of the Consumer Video Choice Coalition (CVCC), Pickering said. “Now that cable has joined the conversation, we believe the FCC has solutions in front of them that can easily be combined to simplify the process and deliver great benefits for consumers.”
The differences highlighted by Pickering show how far apart MVPDs and the FCC are, content company officials told us. Though a solution to the DVR question can likely be worked out, it's very unlikely that pay-TV companies would support a plan that allows third parties to alter the user interface inside their proprietary apps, one official said. Meanwhile, the CVCC and Public Knowledge said the MVPD proposal, which likely would allow third parties to control only the user interface that governs the individual apps and not the actual content, is insufficient. That's likely to be a sticking point, a content company official said. Despite the momentum in support of the pay-TV plan, there's still support for the original FCC proposal in the agency, several content industry officials told us. Though they expect the commission eventually to reach some sort of hybrid plan, it's likely to take a while, the officials said. That means a set-top item is highly unlikely at commissioners' August meeting, but could crop up in September or October, they said.