FCC AllVid Rule Would 'Ban The Set-Top As We Know It': Analyst

The Federal Communications Commission's proposed AllVid devise for providing a common way to access cable, satellite and telco TV services would, if enacted as a regulation, "ban the pay-TV set-top box as we currently know it from the U.S. market," according to IMS Research senior analyst Stephen Froehlich.

"Such a ban would directly affect more than 40 million set-top box shipments and $4.7 billion worth of sales annually," Froehlich wrote in a research report. On the other hand, such an FCC rule could "significantly decrease" the overall cost of customer-premises equipment for pay-TV operators by forcing them to migrate to standardized IP-based gateway architectures, in Froehlich's analysis. Furthermore, if the FCC's AllVid regime no longer required cable set-tops to include both CableCard and FireWire (IEEE 1394) components, that would eliminate about $600 million per year in set-top box costs for the cable industry, he added. networking interfaces, such as Broadcom, Entropic Communications, CopperGate Communications (owned by Sigma Designs), Atheros Communications, DS2 and other makers of Wi-Fi chip sets. Major set-top box vendors affected if the proposed rule is enacted would include Motorola, Cisco Systems, EchoStar, Technicolor, Pace, Humax and Samsung.