Tom Wheeler, chair of the FCC, is circulating a vote for a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, which will be voted on by the FCC on the 18th February. The Notice deals with consumer freedom and set-top boxes.
Wheeler says that ‘99%’ of pay-TV customers in the USA are ‘chained’ to their STBs, which must be leased from pay-TV providers – at an average cost of $230 annually.
The proposal is aimed at allowing consumers to watch services they subscribe to on any device that they choose, through third-party apps if they so desire. Wheeler has identified three core information streams that must be shared with the creators of competitive devices or apps by these providers:
- Service discovery (such as programming availability);
- Entitlements (information about what a device is allowed to do with content); and
- Content delivery.
The new Future of TV Coalition, which was launched in late January, described the proposal as ‘a solution in search of a problem’. The Coalition is formed of programmes, content providers and TV providers. It said that consumers already have choice in which devices they use to access content, and added that the proposal ‘would increase consumer costs by mandating yet a second box inside the home and thus ignores the trends away from in-home boxes and devices’.
In conclusion, the Coalition said, ‘Rather than moving us to a second box and an endless muddle of unanswered questions, the FCC should be moving all of us towards an app-based future that consumers are embracing’.
For more information, see http://tinyurl.com/jfonocw.
