The Cable Industry Trots Out Mitch McConnell To Fight Against Cable Box Competition

Say That Again

from the nobody-believes-the-words-coming-out-of-your-mouth dept

We’ve been talking for weeks about how the cable industry has dramatically ramped up lobbying in an attempt to kill the FCC’s plan to bring some competition to the set top box market. The cable industry opposes the idea for two reasons: competition would dramatically reduce the $21 billion the sector makes each year off of rental fees, but the flood of new, cheaper boxes would also likely direct users — historically locked behind cable’s walled gardens — to a huge variety of streaming video alternatives.

But the cable industry can’t just come out and admit that they’re terrified of competition — so they’ve been attacking the FCC’s plan with a two pronged approach. One, pay for an absolute torrent of hysterically-misleading editorials that claim set top competition will hurt consumers, scare the children, ramp up piracy, and knock the planet off of its orbital axis. The other prong of their attack involves a lobbying mainstay: throwing money at politicians to take positions they don’t have the slightest actual understanding of.

Case in point is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who this week was nudged by the cable sector to jump into the fray with comments like this one:

“Rather than applying a light regulatory touch,” Senator McConnell wrote in a letter to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, “the FCC would require existing programming distributors to provide the copyrighted programming they have licensed from content providers to third party manufacturers and app developers, none of whom would be bound by the agreements to protect the content.”

This is a line that the cable sector and its marionettes have been repeating, but it’s simply not true. As the FCC’s proposal outline notes (pdf), all the plan does is require that cable operators deliver the same expensive programming they do now — using the same copy protection and business arrangements — without requiring a CableCARD. A set top vendor can’t just claim cable broadcasts as their own and ignore existing programming agreements, but that’s one of several misleading arguments being put forth by the sector to kill the initiative.

Advertisers looking to protect legacy cash cow relationships have also been trying to derail the FCC’s effort, claiming that the reform plan will somehow hurt consumers, violate copyright (as the EFF did a great job detailing that’s not true either), and thrust the entire pay TV advertising ecosystem into “chaos”:

“The current market structure for television advertising supports advertisers’ ability to place their ads based on national, regional or local distribution; the type of programming or specific content; the audience composition; and the time of day or night that the ads appear,” the ANA wrote. The proposed regulations could tilt that system toward chaos, it suggested.”

Perhaps the ANA hadn’t noticed, but the legacy pay TV advertising ecosystem already faces a wholesale revolution in terms of how consumers are served TV programming and the ads attached to them. If the existing “market structure” can’t adapt behavioral and location advertising to consumers viewing TV content on a myriad of devices and hardware, they may want to change professions. In reality, advertiser opposition is based on little more than fear; fear that they may have to share revenues with new economy companies, and fear that these companies may actually give consumers what they want — like the ability to skip ads.

But again it’s not as if the FCC’s proposal is even really that dramatic of an idea. It would simply act to accelerate a shift that — thanks in large part to cable and broadcast lobbying power — is already happening but could take another decade to fully materialize. The shift away from the traditional cable box and legacy TV is well underway, and it’s hubris to think it can be stopped by pouting. Opposition to the set top box reform plan is little more than the dull creaking of yet another legacy sector behaving like a toddler because the uncompetitive markets they’ve built over a generation can’t somehow, magically, live forever.

Filed Under: competition, copyright, fcc, mitch mcconnell, set top box