The FCC should “act expeditiously” to clarify the...
The FCC should “act expeditiously” to clarify the current state of the CableCARD and encoding rules in the wake of January’s U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit’s EchoStar decision, said TiVo in an ex parte filing at the…
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commission Monday (http://bit.ly/1hedmmx). CableCARD requirements need to be restored or clarified “to provide consumers and retail manufacturers with certainty that navigation devices purchased at retail will continue to receive cable signals,” said TiVo. The commission should also pursue a new video standard to succeed CableCARDs, but the current system “must remain in place until a successor standard is in place,” TiVo said. The AllVid Tech Company Alliance also backed a new standard (http://bit.ly/IfJY0w). “A successor common interface is necessary to move forward from the cable-only CableCARD interface, which operators are moving away from, toward IP-based interfaces that save bandwidth and better mesh with home and online networks,” said a filing from the group which has included Best Buy, Google, Sony and TiVo. A move to a new standard would prevent consumers from being limited to renting multichannel video programming distributor devices “with little control or innovation in how they view MVPD video programming and services,” said the filing. It said the commission should issue an NPRM on a successor to CableCARD. The future of CableCARDs hangs in the balance post-EchoStar at the FCC and as lobbyists jockey over a bill to junk the ban on integrating security and navigation in set-top boxes (CD Nov 26 p4).