CEA, AT&T and MVPDs All Line Up Against DOE Set-Top Box Test Standards

"Under the NTTAA, DOE, as a federal department, is required to use technical standards that are developed or adopted by voluntary consensus standard bodies unless these standards are inconsistent with applicable law,” wrote Doug Johnson, CEA vice president-technology policy. DOE has acknowledged that their proposed rules are based largely on the CEA-2043 VA, the test standard used in the industry consensus, but CEA and other industry commenters said the DOE should have to show that the VA is impractical under the law before developing it’s own standards. “U.S. law and good public policy favors simply relying on the standard rather than borrowing from, modifying or reinventing it,” wrote Johnson.

Alongside the broad legal objection, the industry objectors cite inefficiency in following the pace of changes in set-top box technology and consumer use, as they did at a DOE meeting on the rulemaking in February (CD Feb 28 p6). In their filing Monday, CEA said “a DOE test procedure promulgated today and locked into law will soon be at best irrelevant, not covering future and unanticipated applications and designs.” In their joint response, Dish Network, DirecTV, and EchoStar said the industry consensus VA includes a process for participants to revise their energy efficiency standards in consultation with the DOE, which they say “supports rapid innovation while achieving substantial energy savings.

CEA and the MVPDs also attacked technical aspects of the proposed rules. AT&T’s Karen Krom and Anna Kapetanakos said a proposed DOE rule requiring that set-top boxes be able to go from an energy-saving “deep sleep” mode to fully functional within 30 seconds was “unsupportable.” A proposed test for Annual Energy Consumption also was criticized by multiple parties, with the Dish Network, DirecTV, and EchoStar joint response saying it was based on inaccurate data. AT&T said any energy efficiencey test for set-top boxes should include offsets for devices with multiple interfaces. “In the case of AT&T U-verse as many as five different output formats or capabilities are provided to meet a myriad of customer display hardware,” said AT&T. “A lack of credits for multiple interfaces penalizes a service provider that supports multiple interfaces.”

Set-top box manufacturer Pace did not weigh in on the possibility of the using the VA instead of DOE rules, but did express concern that some of the testing parameters could lead to negative changes in the way future set-top boxes are made. Pace’s Robert Turner said a DOE proposal to exclude boxes without a direct video output -- a provision intended to keep the rule from applying to devices not normally considered set-top boxes such as iPads --could “lead to an unintended distortion of the market,” with set-top boxes having the video output removed to keep the rule form applying to them. “This would have the unintentional consequence of adding a client receiver (with the attendant power) to serve a TV that would have been fed from the deleted video ports"

The American Cable Association also criticized the rulemaking proposal, specifically citing a clause saying set-top boxes with similar hardware but different software are different models. According to the ACA, this means “many small cable operators would be deemed to be manufacturers” of dozens of different types of set-top boxes, and required to do their own set top testing. “Most small cable operators do not have the technical, financial, or operational resources to perform energy-usage testing on set-top boxes, let alone to do so each and every time they make a new variation in software,” states the ACA filing.

Not all of the comments were negative. DirecTV, Dish Network and EchoStar wrote that they agreed with DOE’s proposal to exclude devices without video input and to exclude the power consumption of input signal equipment from testing. Turner also said Pace supported the 30-second requirement for activation from deep sleep, but said end users should be able to program a longer time if it would save more energy. DOE’s Jeremy Dommu, project manager for set-top video, declined to respond to the specific comments. He said the DOE is still reading them. Additional comments form other associations and industry entities were still being made public at our deadline.