NCTA, pay-TV lawyers meet with FCC, try to shoot down tech industry's AllVid push

Lawyers for the National Cable and Telecommunications Association and every major pay-TV company met with commissioners of the Federal Communications Commission in an attempt to block supporters of the AllVid technology for set-top boxes. The "burdens" imposed by AllVid "would handicap multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs), particularly small MVPDs that lack the necessary resources to reconfigure their networks and deploy new adapters required by the new AllVid proposal, but would not apply to online video distributors (OVDs) or retail device manufacturers," said the National Cable Telecommunications Association, in a memo to FCC Secretary Marlene Dortch.

From Comcast to Charter Communications to AT&T/DirecTV to Bright House Networks, counsel for every major pay-TV operator, save for Verizon and Cablevision, was represented in the meeting. AllVid is one of two tech proposals rendered over the summer by the FCC's Downloadable Security Technology Advisory Committee (DSTAC), a committee set up to find a new technology that would enable retail set-top devices to work in the pay-TV ecosystem. Google, Amazon, TiVo and other technology/consumer electronics companies have thrown their support behind AllVid. This technology would employ a kind of bridge device that would securely decode pay-TV signals and render them usable on set-tops consumers purchase at retail rather than those they could lease from their cable, satellite or telecommunication provider. The pay-TV industry has been stridently opposed to AllVid since DSTAC proposed it as a possible solution to the retail set-top issue in late August.