CEA And CERC Urge Decisive FCC Action In Cable-CE Proceeding

30-Apr-03

Citing Congress' legislative mandates to act and the momentum and direction of prior Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rulings, the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) and the Consumer Electronics Retailers Coalition (CERC) filed ""reply"" comments in the FCC proceeding on competition and compatibility in devices that receive cable and other multichannel services. CEA and CERC concluded: ""There is only one outcome to this proceeding that would be of benefit to American consumers. That is the approval and expeditious implementation of the matters on which comment has been sought in this [rulemaking], including an outright ban on the 'downresolution' of HDTV content.""CERC and CEA filed initial joint comments with the FCC on March 28, calling for expedited approval of the cable-consumer electronics (CE) digital television (DTV) ""plug-and-play"" agreement. In their ""reply"" comments, the organizations said that comments to the FCC from content providers, arguing for greater copy protection impositions as well as others arguing for fewer security measures, all missed the essential point: ""A decade of congressional and Commission action has narrowed the options available to the parties, leaving only this one, viable channel for success.""CEA and CERC said that Commission adoption of the agreement is necessary to achieve Congress' legislative intentions, and that a clear jurisdictional basis exists for the Commission to act expeditiously to ensure cable-CE compatibility and the commercial availability of digital cable-ready products. ""CERC and CEA continue to urge the FCC to grant expeditious approval and implementation of the measures in this proceeding in order to serve consumers, enable competition, and move the DTV and high-definition television (HDTV) transitions forward,"" the filing notes. ""Not a single comment filed with the Commission takes issue with or even questions the proposed technical regulations relevant to this proceeding.""Noting that many comments submitted to the FCC seek to broaden rather than narrow the scope of the proceeding, CERC and CEA argue that ""the FCC need not, and should not, tarry on them in order to approve and implement the matters before it.""In response to the broadcast industry's concerns regarding the omission of over-the-air tuners in the ""plug-and-play"" agreement, CERC and CEA notes that it makes business sense for a digital cable-ready TV to also be digital ""over-the-air-ready."" ""While CEA and CERC, as representatives of competitive manufacturers and retailers, cannot make pledges as to business intentions, their major members have made it very clear that the economics and benefits of including both types of tuning capabilities in the same chip or chipset are manifest for product planning purposes for televisions,"" the filing states. The CERC and CEA filing also addresses objections to the ""encoding rules"" that protect consumer home recording expectations and guard against such anti-consumer practices as ""selectable output control"" and ""downresolution."" ""FCC regulations that delegate...licensing power over the attachment of competitive devices, and that allow resulting licenses to include copy protection constraints, cannot allow consumer enjoyment and expectations to become the private capital of content providers and distributors to be bartered, solely among each other, for commercial advantage.""While CEA and CERC respect the inputs and concerns of those who believe the encoding rule regulation allows too many restrictions on consumer expectations, and of those who believe it allows too few, we believe the text submitted to the Commission, as modified to provide for a complete ban on downresolution, strikes an essential and correct balance.""In summary, without encoding rules, not only would there be 'no deal,' there could be no deal unless a radically different and more intrusive regulatory regime were substituted for the license and for the rules.""For more information about the CEA, visit www.ce.org.

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