FCC's Broadband plan re cablecards (Sage filed something?)

[Sparhawk6]

Did anyone see this?

On page 49 (Chapter 4), the plan begins discussing CableCards. The FCC has asked that a new device be created and implemented by December 31, 2010.

http://www.broadband.gov/download-plan/

Of note, they recommend that the device:

Should not require restrictive licensing, disclosure or certification.
Any criterion should apply equally to retail and
operator-supplied devices. Any intellectual property should
be available to all parties at a low cost and on reasonable
and non-discriminatory terms.

Check out the footnote to that paragraph:

SageTV Ex Parte in re NBP PN #27, filed Feb. 16, 2010, at 7, 12

Here is another reference to a Sage filing: SageTV to Marlene H. Dortch,
Secretary, FCC, GN Docket Nos. 09-47, 09-51, 09-137
(Jan. 29, 2010) (SageTV Jan. 29, 2010 Ex Parte)

Sage filed something. I'd love to read it...I wonder if I can find it.

EDIT: Found SageTV's letters/filings:

http://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/ecfs/docume...?id=7020384672

http://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/ecfs/docume...?id=7020387077

[jreichen]

Great job digging that one up! Do you have any links?

[Sparhawk6]

Originally Posted by jreichen

Great job digging that one up! Do you have any links?

Sorry, here is the link the the broadband report:

http://www.broadband.gov/download-plan/

Do a search for "SageTV"

[Sparhawk6]

Also, I'm happy to hear that Sage is trying to do something about CableCard.

I'm also pleased to see this because it is an admission that the HD-PVR is not a long-term solution.

But sadly it is also a firm indication that Sage has no plans to make Sage cablecard-ready under the current spec. I don't believe that they would be complaining if they had plans to pay for certification.

[jreichen]

It looks like they had 3 filings in there. Now to find out where to get them.

I'm glad to see they're involved with the FCC. It shows to me they plan on sticking around for a while.

[Sparhawk6]

Originally Posted by jreichen

It looks like they had 3 filings in there. Now to find out where to get them.

I'm glad to see they're involved with the FCC. It shows to me they plan on sticking around for a while.

I edited my post.

Here are two filings:

http://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/ecfs/docume...?id=7020384672

http://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/ecfs/docume...?id=7020387077

I'm not sure about a 3rd.

[sic0048]

Personally I cannot get too excited about any of this.

So Congress mandated that the FCC do a blue ribbon study. Big deal. It doesn't mean any of this will see the light of day. It simply allows the politicans to say they are studying the problem. I certainly am a pessimist, but I don't expect any of these recommendations to actually be implimented anytime soon (and perhaps ever). Congress has bigger issues it wants to tackle right now.

I'm glad to see Sage try to weigh in on things, but a couple letters isn't going to change anything either. Can you imagine how many letters like this the FCC must receive? Unless they are from people or companies with deep, deep pockets - these opinions won't matter.

I hope I am proved wrong. I would like nothing better. But I wouldn't count on the FCC changing any of this any time soon.

[jreichen]

I thought I saw a reference to a letter from December in there but it looks like I misread the footnotes.

[Sparhawk6]

Originally Posted by sic0048

Personally I cannot get too excited about any of this.

I'm glad to see Sage try to weigh in on things, but a couple letters isn't going to change anything either. Can you imagine how many letters like this the FCC must receive? Unless they are from people or companies with deep, deep pockets - these opinions won't matter.

Actually, the citation to SageTV's letters shows that they listened to and acknowledged Sage.

Also, if you read the report, it is pretty one-sided in favor of opening the CableCard restrictions.

[Sparhawk6]

Originally Posted by sic0048

Personally I cannot get too excited about any of this.

Congress has bigger issues it wants to tackle right now.

Congress will have nothing to do with this. This is the FCC's realm, which, as you suggest, was created to deal with issues that Congress doesn't have time to handle.

The FCC regulates the cable industry, so their mandates are binding on the industry (they can only challenge them in court). Granted, this report is a recommendation, but it could lead to binding decisions.

[sic0048]

I really do hope I am proved wrong. But today's politics isn't about doing the right thing - it is about money. There is no motivation for the cable companies to move away from the restrictive nature of the current Cable Card environment. To do so would allow more people to move away from the cable company suppled DVR. That would result in a loss of revenue for the cable company.

I realize that we are talking about a small fraction of the total population since most people will still stay with the cable companies DVR. But that is also the reason it will never happen. The general public doesn't care about cable card restrictions and until there is a public backlash against the cable companies, nothing will change. People hate the cable companies, but for other reasons than a restrictive cable card. 99.999999% of people don't even know there are other choices and therefore aren't going to weigh in on the issue. In the mean time, the cable companies have the deep pockets financially and therefore will have the FCC's ear.

Again, this is coming from a really pessimistic person. I never think the forcast for snow will ever come true either (I live in the South), but occationally it really does snow when the weather people say it will. Of course they are wrong about 95% of the time too. Sometimes they get lucky - perhaps we'll get lucky with the FCC too.

[MitchSchaft]

This should be merged with the other thead. Wishful thinking and speculation are for the birds.
Although, I don't believe Sage will ever see cablecards. Aside from the 3rd party setup that nobody has gotten to work after a few months .

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by Sparhawk6

I'm also pleased to see this because it is an admission that the HD-PVR is not a long-term solution.

I wouldn't go that far. For one, this has nil affect on Satellite AFAIK so the HD PVR (or something like it) is the only long term solution for satellite.

And of course the other issue is, no matter how easy you make it to license a conditional access technology, unless major changes are made in the rules/laws in North America, it's still going to be burdened and crippled by restrictive DRM.

But sadly it is also a firm indication that Sage has no plans to make Sage cablecard-ready under the current spec. I don't believe that they would be complaining if they had plans to pay for certification.

It shouldn't be a surprise given Jeff's position on DRM.

Originally Posted by sic0048

I really do hope I am proved wrong. But today's politics isn't about doing the right thing - it is about money. There is no motivation for the cable companies to move away from the restrictive nature of the current Cable Card environment. To do so would allow more people to move away from the cable company suppled DVR. That would result in a loss of revenue for the cable company.

Frankly I doubt they care that much, they could just jack the cablecard rental price up to compensate.

[fresnoboy]

Originally Posted by stanger89

I wouldn't go that far. For one, this has nil affect on Satellite AFAIK so the HD PVR (or something like it) is the only long term solution for satellite.

And of course the other issue is, no matter how easy you make it to license a conditional access technology, unless major changes are made in the rules/laws in North America, it's still going to be burdened and crippled by restrictive DRM.



It shouldn't be a surprise given Jeff's position on DRM.



Frankly I doubt they care that much, they could just jack the cablecard rental price up to compensate.

You don't need major changes in the rules. The FCC never mandated all that DRM crap in the first place, it was imposed by the MSO's as a way of justifying micromanaging the certification process and requiring onerous requirements on 3rd party device vendors. Go read the DFAST order or any of the FCC orders on the topic.

The only requirement from the FCC is that DVR vendors obey the CCI bits: dont-copy, copy-once, and copy-freely. Anything above that is not found in ANY rule.

As for having this have a prayer of implementation, well, the difference this go around is that it's not just Tivo and the CE companies, but Google also filed in that docket and seems to be readying a product in this space as well. That will go a long way to having all this become real.

That said, the MSO's will go ape over this and push back in every way. But I think this has the best chance of any effort to open up the video space so that people don't have to settle for the crap that the cable operators foist on us today.

[polen]

Wow, nicely played Jeff and Mike, I hope it pans out.

Something I saw mentioned alot was a gateway device, could this mean SageTV is developing a SageTV Server appliance?

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by sic0048

I'm glad to see Sage try to weigh in on things, but a couple letters isn't going to change anything either. Can you imagine how many letters like this the FCC must receive? Unless they are from people or companies with deep, deep pockets - these opinions won't matter.

Maybe you didn't mean it this way, but your post implied a certain level of corruption. If you meant it that way, I think that's probably unfair (and if you didn't, I've certainly read comments from other people that think that). Sure, the FCC is going to listen very, very carefully to cable and satellite companies, and content creators. The cable/satellite TV industry is almost a ~$100 billion industry, employing hundreds of thousands of people. Content creators make up another very large industry. So, you'd expect both of those groups to have a say in what happens, almost certainly more so than some random person off the street.

That being said, I'm sure they go through every comment. There's probably a database and/or Excel spreadsheet sitting at the FCC with entries for each comment, with some sort of response/decision.

Originally Posted by Sparhawk6

Also, if you read the report, it is pretty one-sided in favor of opening the CableCard restrictions.

Sort of. It did it carefully. It didn't say there couldn't be licensing costs, or certification testing. And it also seemed to imply that DRM and copy protection would be included, given the reference to copy protection flags being passed on to devices behind the gateway. Sure, that doesn't necessarily mean that there would have to be complicated DRM schemes with encryption, nor does it mean that the certification programs would have to check compliance with copy protection flags, but unless there's some drastic institutional change in the coming years I think we can expect those things.

Originally Posted by stanger89

I wouldn't go that far. For one, this has nil affect on Satellite AFAIK so the HD PVR (or something like it) is the only long term solution for satellite.

I thought these gateways were also suppose to apply to satellite TV companies.

Originally Posted by fresnoboy

You don't need major changes in the rules. The FCC never mandated all that DRM crap in the first place, it was imposed by the MSO's as a way of justifying micromanaging the certification process and requiring onerous requirements on 3rd party device vendors. Go read the DFAST order or any of the FCC orders on the topic.

I don't think that's an accurate characterization. The FCC has discussed copy protection mechanisms, and the jump from that to the sort of DRM used in CableCard or firewire isn't a huge heap. The FCC isn't going to write technical specifications for how things are going to work, particularly in their regulation documents.

Nor do I think the requirements and certification program are completely unreasonable. Maybe the specific requirements are- I'm not familiar with them- but not the general idea behind them. You may disagree with the need for copy protection, but if you, for the sake of argument, accept copy-protection, DRM with a certification process makes sense. What good is copy protection if manufacturers ignore the flags, or if software developers (particularly open-source developers or off-shore developers) write programs to get around them?

There are some technical alternatives to a strict certification program for copy protection. The gateway devices are going to be constantly connected to a network anyway. You could imagine a freely-licensed DRM system with the gateway acting as a content license server. It could be relatively easy for a vendor to license and implement the DRM system, and to get a unique set of cryptographic keys to use with it. You wouldn't necessarily need to certify that a system obeys the copy protection flags because if someone finds a way around them you could simply revoke that vendor's keys. That wouldn't necessarily help for dealing with content already sent out by the gateway, but at least you could cut off the offenders. That being said, in practice it would be bad for everyone if keys had to be revoked. So, I still think you'd want some sort of certification program. And that's certainly going to cost tens of thousands of dollars.

As a side note, unless they know something I don't, Sage was over-selling digital watermarking as a tool for limiting piracy. You'd need to add unique watermarks to each video streams (for each customer) to be able to pin point the source. You could do this at the gateway device, but now you've made that more complicated. Perhaps not prohibitively so, but now the gateway would have to not only decrypt, but also watermark all outgoing video files in real-time. That's not going to be easy. You can't just watermark the compressed MPEG2 stream, because then re-encoding it to H.264 would almost certainly remove it. So, roughly speaking, for each outgoing video stream, the gateway would have to 1) decrypt it, 2) decode the video, 3) watermark it, 4) re-encode the watermarked video. Each of those things is relatively computationally expensive.

Then there's the issue of how well the watermark actually works. Basically, digital watermarking doesn't have a great track record when it comes to security. Look up SDMI for an example. Sage implicitly admitted this by saying cable companies should feel free to keep the watermarking scheme secret, so potential violators wouldn't be able to tell if they've removed the watermark. That's known as security through obscurity, which has a similarly bad track record.

[sic0048]

Originally Posted by reggie14

Maybe you didn't mean it this way, but your post implied a certain level of corruption. If you meant it that way, I think that's probably unfair (and if you didn't, I've certainly read comments from other people that think that). Sure, the FCC is going to listen very, very carefully to cable and satellite companies, and content creators. The cable/satellite TV industry is almost a ~$100 billion industry, employing hundreds of thousands of people. Content creators make up another very large industry. So, you'd expect both of those groups to have a say in what happens, almost certainly more so than some random person off the street.

That being said, I'm sure they go through every comment. There's probably a database and/or Excel spreadsheet sitting at the FCC with entries for each comment, with some sort of response/decision.

I didn't mean to imply any corruption. Sorry if it came off that way. What I meant to convey is that I suspect that the CEO of 1 cable company sitting in the FCC chairman's office is going to have more leverage than tens of thousands of letters from private citizens and small companies. Again, that's just my opinion. Our government isn't suppose to work like that, but we all know it does sometimes.

[samgreco]

Did I miss read something? I thought that there was mention of a conference call Sage was involved in. Seems to me, a lot more than a letter from some small company.

I for one am at least encouraged that a company like Sage is that involved and that someone at the FCC is actually listening to them.

From what I am seeing, this FCC leadership seems to lean way more towards the consumer side than the last.

[Sparhawk6]

Engadget HD did a great summary of some exciting news:

http://hd.engadget.com/2010/03/17/a-...ndaids-by-thi/

But the last one might just be our favorite, it would allow anyone to write software to support CableCARD tuners for PCs. This would mean that if SageTV wanted to support CableCARD it wouldn't have to pay thousands to CableLabs to be certified -- although it would have to pay for a PlayReady license as it's the only DRM currently approved. Now we always suspected that SageTV wanted to support CableCARDs and based on the fact that this new rule is because of comments by the company to the FCC, it appears to be the case.

[davenlr]

DirecTv is already working on a gateway DVR (HMC30) to be used with tuner-less set top boxes. I should think in their design, they will make it proprietary, but leave themselves the option to "open it up" if so required by law.