OPINION: Opposing VOD views
By Paul Sweeting of ContentAgenda -- Video Business, 7/25/2008
JULY 25 | IN A SERIES of filings this week with the Federal Communications Commission, the Consumer Electronics Assn., the National Assn. of Theatre Owners and a consortium of consumer-rights groups all urged the agency to deny a petition by the Motion Picture Assn. of America to relax the regulations barring the use of selectable output controls (SOC) on cable set-top boxes.
Paul Sweeting is editor of Content Agenda
The MPAA claims the waiver is necessary to prevent the high-value, early-release content from being sent over unprotected video outputs where it could conceivably be captured and recorded and then redistributed over the Internet.
Without such protection, the studios say, it is simply too risky to make movies available in the new early high-def window.
In 2003, however, the FCC banned the use of such restricting technology to encourage consumer adoption of digital TV sets. Many early sets lacked the type of outputs that support encryption and it was feared that allowing content owners to block unencrypted ones would disenfranchise early DTV adopters.
In its filing this week, CEA argued the situation has not materially changed in the years since, and that allowing content owners to “turn off” certain outputs at will in effect gives them veto power over the types of equipment consumers can use to watch content they’ve legally acquired and paid for.
Read the full column on ContentAgenda.com.
