A top digital liberties advocacy group asked the Federal Communications Commission March 15 to stop satellite and cable television from deliberately cutting digital TV signals on analog outputs, which causes people buying high-definition television equipment to take inferior quality on behalf of content protection, a practice known as "down-rezzing" and supported by the movie industry.
"If I have paid for high-definition ESPN or HBO, there is no reason that I should be forced to use a lower-quality analog signal just because the motion picture industry wants to impose more content protection restrictions on me," the Electronic Frontier Foundation's senior attorney Fred von Lohmann said, announcing the request. "Until the FCC acts to prohibit 'down-rezzing,' consumers won't know whether their DirecTV and cable set-top boxes will continue to provide them with the high-definition content they paid for."
The FCC previously barred down-rezzing on high-definition TV signals re-transmitted on cable or satellite, the EFF said, but there remains a question about whether premium cable TV programming could be subject to degradation over analog, the group continued. The EFF said it feared that downgrading indicated Hollywood is trying to "push TV viewers to use content-protected digital outputs, irrespective of the impact on the millions of Americans who have equipment that depends on analog outputs."
DirecTV and the National Cable Television Association are said to support down-rezzing. The EFF said it believes they did so because they fear the movie industry might "otherwise withhold content from satellite and cable broadcasters."
But the Consumer Electronics Association, the Home Recording Rights Coalition, Public Knowledge, the Consumers Union, and the Consumer Federation of America oppose down-rezzing.
“There is a real possibility that consumers could be worse off after this Commission rulemaking than they are now,” Public Knowledge president Gigi B. Sohn said in February. “The FCC has to make certain that even as it tries to advance technology that it doesn’t require the industry to produce inferior products to satisfy content providers.”
