FCC’s Proposed Gateway Mandate Misses Opportunity for Alignment with Pay-TV Operators’ Incentives on Open-standard STBs – IMS Research

AUSTIN, Texas--(EON: Enhanced Online News)--In the details of “Recommendation 4.12” of the National Broadband Plan, the FCC is taking an unnecessarily adversarial position with pay-TV operators, who are forecast to deploy 32 million open-standard STBs without the FCC’s intervention.

“For the first time, the FCC has an opportunity to harness a powerful technology trend to enable innovation in CPE, and I hope that the commission will realize this time that increasing operators’ costs could deny the potential cost savings of highly-integrated broadband pay-TV gateways to operators and consumers alike.”

Stephen Froehlich, a senior analyst with IMS Research, notes that “Without intervention from the FCC, many US pay-TV operators are already moving to adopt the pay-TV gateway model for whole-home DVR services. In my interactions with them, major US operators have expressed positive reactions to partnering with established CE companies to reduce their set-top box costs or eliminate set-top boxes entirely.

“However, the FCC seems determined, as it has in previous rounds of regulation, to take an adversarial position with the pay-TV operators instead of harnessing their inherent interest to move away from expensive, proprietary technologies. If the regulation is implemented as it appears in “Recommendation 4.12” of the National Broadband Plan, the operators will have little choice other than to fight the FCC on every step of implementation, denying US consumers the value of open-standard secure video networking.

“For the first time, the FCC has an opportunity to harness a powerful technology trend to enable innovation in CPE, and I hope that the commission will realize this time that increasing operators’ costs could deny the potential cost savings of highly-integrated broadband pay-TV gateways to operators and consumers alike.”

Froehlich concludes, “I am confident that if the FCC simply certifies the gateway approach as a valid way to meet the “separable security” requirement behind CableCARD and further frees open-standard decoders from the requirement to have IEEE-1394 interfaces while allowing operators to require that decoders support of a fully open-standard remote user interface protocol of their choosing that there will be more than enough incentives for most US pay-TV operators to adopt open-standard TV gateways without need for mandate or enforcement.”

About IMS Research

IMS Research is a supplier of market research and consultancy services on a wide range of electronics markets. The company headquarters in Wellingborough, UK and has offices in Austin, Texas and Shanghai, China. IMS Research publishes research on the set-top box and TV gateway markets, among others.