MPAA to FCC: critics of video blocking proposals are lying
The movie studios have a new Holy Grail, it seems: Federal Communications Commission permission to cable companies to shut down the analog streams on video-on-demand movie programming. As Ars readers know, we’ve been covering this issue for a while. But the Motion Picture Association of America’s latest letter to the FCC pulls out all the stops, rhetoric-wise, calling criticisms of this scheme “complete and utter nonsense that only can be intended to stir up baseless fears among consumers that their equipment will suddenly go dark and be unusable for any purpose.”
These are “deplorable claims,” the MPAA told the FCC on Monday. Plus they “distort the truth.” They’re also “simply and irrefutably untrue,” the trade association adds (in case you didn’t get it yet).
False untruthfulness
The main target of MPAA’s outrage is the advocacy group Public Knowledge, one of whose spokespersons, Harold Feld, has an ongoing video series called “Five Minutes With Harold Feld,” in which the aforementioned offers his takes on “incredibly boring and wonky things” and tries “to make them slightly less boring, because this stuff is important.” The allegedly offensive five-minute video in question deals with what MPAA wants, which is technically called “Selectable Output Control”—shutting down the analog stream to HDTVs and other devices because it is less secure (copyable) than digital streams, which can be scrambled. The FCC currently prohibits the practice.
The studios say they want to plug the “analog hole” with SOC because it will allow them to offer the public pre-DVD VoD movie releases with less threat of piracy. The problem, as Feld’s video on this subject points out, is that a considerable amount of analog only connected equipment won’t be able to receive these offerings. “And for this,” Feld skeptically declares, “we’re going to break 25 million television sets, and break your TiVO, and break your Slingbox, and make sure you can’t use it on VoD anymore, because [Feld looking especially skeptical here] it’s so important to get these movies to video-on-demand earlier.”
Feld’s “deplorable claims” are “absolutely, 100 percent untrue,” MPAA counters. “The use of SOC would have no impact whatsoever on the ability of existing television sets, Tivos, Slingboxes or any other consumer product to work in exactly the same fashion that such devices work today. While products with only unprotected outputs and inputs would not be able to receive the new early window offerings that would be made possible by the SOC waiver, no device would be broken. Nor would any consumer be unable to receive traditional VOD in the same way that he or she does today.”
A considerable amount of time in this debate is being spent rather theatrically denouncing words that clearly function as metaphors. As we’ve pointed out, although SOC won’t render analog-only HDTVs and other home theater equipment “broken,” as in “physically damaged with wires poking out of the set,” it will disable the ability of this gear to access what will immediately become the most valuable offering on television: pre-DVD release VoD movies.
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