Amazon’s On-Demand MVPD

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At a congressional oversight hearing last month, FCC chairman Tom Wheeler indicated that his earlier proposal to classify certain over-the-top video services as “multichannel video programming distributors” (MVPDs), a regulatory term of art that applies to cable and satellite providers, was on more or less indefinite hold.

“The purpose of rulemaking is to learn,” Wheeler told the committee. “We learned that [a] vast number of things are developing very rapidly, and we have not moved forward on that notice of proposed rulemaking and don’t see, until situations change, we would.”

Among those “vast number of things,” no doubt, were Amazon’s confidential plans to bundle third-party OTT services in with Amazon Prime, monitor_globeallowing Prime Instant Video users to put together a package of OTT channels through a single subscription. As first reported by BloombergBusiness, Amazon Prime customers “will have the option of adding other online subscriptions to their accounts, including major, well-known movie and TV channels, and Amazon will also sell prepackaged bundles of its own creation…[T]he new feature may go live as soon as next month.”

The offering would “resemble something between a cable-TV subscription, though without live programming, and the online array of video offered through devices from Roku Inc., Apple TV or Amazon’s own Fire TV,” according to Bloomberg. Read More »

FCC Hitting Pause On Pay-TV Overhaul?

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For much of the past year, the Federal Communications Commission has been conducting a pair of proceedings that together, depending on their outcomes, could go a long way toward remaking the pay-TV business as we’ve known it. But at an oversight hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee yesterday, FCC chairman Tom Wheeler seemed to turn down the heat under both of them.

Receiving the most attention at the hearing was the recently completed report by the Downloadable Security Technical Advisory Committee Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Tom Wheeler gestures at the FCC Net Neutrality hearing(DSTAC), in particular a controversial proposal in it to require pay-TV operators to disaggregate their services into discreet components that would allow third-party set-top box makers to design their own user interfaces that could leverage elements of pay-TV services to create new user experiences (see our previous discussions of the debate here, here and here).

Republican members of the committee were sharply critical of the proposal and accused the FCC of exceeding Congress’s mandate for DSTAC in allowing the committee to consider non-security elements of pay-TV interoperability. Some members all but endorsed a competing proposal, put forth by pay-TV service providers, to adopt an app-based approach to interoperability under which service providers would, in effect, virtualize their existing STBs, complete with proprietary UIs, into apps that could be downloaded and run on third-party devices. Read More »

The Wrong Debate Over Set-Top Boxes

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Today (Nov. 9th) was the last day for filing comments with the Federal Communications Commission regarding the final report of the Downloadable Security Technical Advisory Committee (DSTAC) and folks in the pay-TV industry were clearly getting nervous that the FCC might finally, really do something this time to “tear up the set-top box.”

Last week, eight of the largest pay-TV providers, along with the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, the Motion Picture Association Push_button_cable_boxof America, and several equipment manufacturers together sent a phalanx of lawyers and lobbyists to FCC headquarters, ex parte, in a desperate bid to head off any movement by the agency toward a rulemaking that would require pay-TV providers to disaggregate their services into rearrangable  parts as proposed by the technology company and public interest faction of DSTAC.

The group was particularly exercised by an ex parte filing with the commission in late October by Public Knowledge, Google, Amazon and Hauppauge purporting to fill in the technical details of the “virtual head-end” proposal made by the technology faction of DSTAC for separating out the components of pay-TV services. According to MPAA, NCTA et. al., however, the new version “is so changed that it is barely recognizable from [the technology group’s] earlier proposal in the DSTAC Report,” and required more time for study before they could adequately respond to it. Read More »

Will The FCC Finally ‘Tear Up The Set-Top Box’?

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The FCC kicked off the second phase of a process this week that could, eventually, change how pay-TV service is delivered to the home and by whom. On Monday, the commission issued a formal notice seeking comments on a set of proposals developed by the Downloadable Security Technology Advisory Committee (DSTAC) for how to enable third-party retail set-top boxes to better interoperate with pay-TV services. DSTAC submitted its proposals last week and the FCC posted six-page summary of its report on Friday [note: the FCC’s IT system will be inaccessible  until Sept. 8 due to an upgrade, so links temporarily may not work].

The first phase of the process began in January, when the FCC convened DSTAC at the direction of Congress. As spelled out in the Satellite Television Extension and Locset-top_box_openalism Act Reauthorization law (STELAR) passed last December, DSTAC’s mandate was to “identify, report, and recommend performance objectives, technical capabilities, and technical standards of a not unduly burdensome, uniform, and technology- and platform-neutral software-based downloadable security system designed to promote the competitive availability of [pay-TV] navigation devices in furtherance of section 629 of the Communications Act of 1934.”

It did not go well. From the beginning there was disagreement within both the committee and the FCC as to the proper scope of the mission and the committee soon devolved into two opposing and roughly equal camps, with pay-TV providers and equipment makers on one side, and CE makers and technology companies, along with consumer advocates, in the other. In broad strokes, the first camp wanted to focus the discussion narrowly on the technical aspects of downloadable security, while the latter camp sought to focus the discussion more broadly on the goal of “promot[ing] the competitive availability of navigation devices” including security and non-security elements of pay-TV service. Read More »

Cracking The OTT Ice On Live Local Sports

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What a difference a spin-off makes. Barely a week after Major League Baseball’s 30 team owners approved the spin-off of BAM Tech, the streaming technology arm of MLB Advanced Media, reports surfaced that the league is drafting deal papers with Fox Sports to extend authenticated in-market streaming rights to Fox’s 15 regional sports networks (RSNs) beginning with the 2016 season.

Like most major sports leagues, MLB controls streaming rights for all of its teams’ games and game-related content. The league sells a high-end package of out-of-market games through MLB.com, but only the Toronto Blue Jays currently offer in-market streaming. The league and U.S. RSNs, led by Fox, have been negotiating Franklin_Gutierrez_hitting_HRover in-market streaming rights for years, but the league’s insistence that all streams be hosted by MLBAM –officially to ensure stream quality — has long been a roadblock to any deal because it would require Fox’s pay-TV affiliates to share subscriber information with the league during the authentication process. Under the deal now being finalized, according to the reports, Fox will handle authentication and fans will be able to access the games through their local RSN’s website, via the FoxSportsGo app, or through their service provider’s TV Everywhere app.

As part of the deal, Fox will still be required to use BAM Tech as its primary streaming technology vendor, and to pay a rights fee to MLB equal to around 4 percent of the team’s overall media deal. Read More »