Competitive Availability of Navigation Devices

The House Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet held a hearing entitled "The National Broadband Plan: " on Thursday, April 29. The hearing examined recommendations contained in the National Broadband Plan to stimulate competition and innovation in set-top boxes and other video navigation devices. The NBP points out that while consumers have access to hundreds of mobile and computing devices, there is not a similarly diverse retail market for set-top boxes and other video navigation devices. The NBP states that further innovation in set-top boxes could lead to higher broadband utilization as video encourages more broadband usage.

Subcommittee Chairman Rick Boucher (D-VA) said the ability to have plug-and-play capability for set-top boxes remains an elusive goal, but one that an Federal Communications Commission-proposed gateway box could solve. he's pleased that the FCC had proposed such a gateway device be implemented by 2012 (as part of the FCC's national broadband plan). He also said a workable CableCARD regime could help drive a competitive marketplace. That regime, he said, is now riddled with problems. "Revised CableCARD rules are needed for the near term," he said.

The FCC has failed to aid consumers by creating the competitive market for set-top boxes Congress envisioned in the 1996 Telecommunications Act, Public Knowledge Legal Director Harold Feld testified. The result, Feld said, is that customers for cable, satellite and telephone-provided video services still must rent their set-top boxes from those companies and can't easily take advantage of a more competitive market for devices like digital video recorders (DVRs).