Washington: Amazon.com says the cable industry’s own proposal for how to shift Americans away from the set-top boxes they currently rent for hundreds of dollars a year is riddled with flaws.
The online retail giant is arguing that the cable companies’ vision for accessing TV content in the future — via apps embedded in smart TVs, phones and other devices — doesn’t guarantee the copy protections that currently exist with set-top boxes. (Copy protection has emerged as a key issue in the ongoing fight to determine how cable viewers will someday get their shows and movies.)
The cable-backed “app-based approach” to getting your programs is an alternative to what some federal regulators want instead: A system that forces cable companies to hand over all their programming so that any other company — including, perhaps, Amazon — could build and sell their own set-top boxes straight to consumers. (Amazon chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos also owns The Washington Post.)
Proponents of the Federal Communications Commission’s plan say letting other firms build competing set-top boxes would give consumers more choices than just what they can rent from their cable providers, and would lead to a range of new user interfaces for TV viewers to choose from. Critics say requiring companies such as Comcast to make their TV content freely available to any other box maker poses copyright risks, raising the possibility of theft by content pirates.
Both the FCC approach and the cable industry proposal could reduce the cost of renting set-top boxes — in some cases, by potentially eliminating the need for them altogether. But Amazon’s critique of the industry, disclosed in a regulatory filing, claims that the app-based approach has nothing to say about copy protection. As a result, the industry plan “does not in fact address the security concerns [cable companies] have identified” as a main reason to oppose the FCC’s plan.
In a statement, the National Cable and Telecommunications Association said Wednesday that apps based on HTML5 technology do provide enough security for TV content. A recent FCC report, it said, contains “extensive discussion of exactly how HTML5 secures” TV content, “including support for hardware roots of trust.”
If this sounds confusing, that’s because you’re watching the political process play out in real time. In a nutshell, cable companies are saying new regulations could disrupt the copy-protection regime that undergirds the economics of TV. Amazon’s saying the cable industry’s counterproposal isn’t worth its salt, in part because Amazon potentially stands to gain from a more stringent set of requirements on cable companies.
amazon
