joe, beta

Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, and Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, said in a joint statement that they would hold meetings in June to examine how the Communications Act meets the current needs of consumers, the telecommunications industry and the Federal Communications Commission.

Let me preface this by saying that I feel like I have a good basic grasp of the issues at play here, but I'm wide open to correction if I'm confused about something.

I posted in April about how the DC Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the FCC in a case where the regulatory agency had sanctioned Comcast for throttling BitTorrent traffic.

Since then, there has been talk at the FCC of partially reclassifying broadband internet (PDF) to apply provisions of different sections of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Why the change? Well, among other things, it would grant the FCC the authority to impose, as Ars Technica puts it, "a stripped-down version of common carrier nondiscrimination rules" -- and would allow sanctions like the ones struck down by the DC Circuit Court of Appeals to stand.

If the Congressional revisions to the Telecommunications Act of 1996 manage to move forward, those changes would, if passed, trump and likely circumscribe anything the FCC attempts to implement in the way of reclassification efforts. That, in my mind, seems to send a signal from the legislators to the FCC, suggesting that FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski consider leaving this one to the legislature before investing too much time and energy in making regulatory changes that may be undercut by the revisions to the law.

Just as the 1996 revision updated the original 1934 telecommunications legislation to let telephone companies, over-the-air broadcasters, and cable companies all play in each others' sandboxes, any changes to the 1996 version would focus on the availability, administration, and pricing of high-speed broadband internet access relative to the regulatory framework already imposed on older technologies.

First, of course, they would have to add in the words "broadband" and "internet" -- which don't even appear in the act as it was passed in 1996. That means we're not looking at a timeline of weeks or even months, but maybe years.

But hey, you have to start somewhere, right?

I’d like to set the record straight regarding Boxee’s access to Hulu. Boxee uses a web browser to access Hulu’s content – just like Firefox or Internet Explorer. Boxee users click on a link to Hulu’s website and the video within that page plays. We don’t “take” the video. We don’t copy it. We don’t put ads on top of it. The video and the ads play like they do on other browsers or on Hulu Desktop. And it certainly is legal to do so.

Boxee is an incredible little application, available on Mac, Windows, and Linux systems. It aggregates streaming content providers from all over the web in one convenient, shiny interface. You can access everything from YouTube to CNN Video to music streaming services like Last.fm.

The quote above is from Boxee CEO and co-founder Avner Ronen, in response to testimony Comcast and NBC executives gave before Congress recently as they try to push their merger deal through the modern-day antitrust minefield.

Boxee has been battling the executives over at Hulu--where I consume the overwhelming majority of television programs I view--about Hulu's refusal to allow its content to be included in Boxee's interface. Presumably, Hulu wants the page visits that they wouldn't get if people were sucking their content out of their site and into Boxee.

As NBC's Zucker told Congress, Hulu has distribution deals with several outlets that use its content, and probably pay a pretty licensing fee to do so.

A November 2009 Techdirt article talked about how annoyed Hulu has been that people are using the code it provides to embed their videos in other web sites to, well, embed their video in other web sites.

But these "serial embedders," who just put all of Hulu's content on their own web page and reap the ad revenue that Hulu should have had, are the real problem. "Specialized browsers"--like Boxee--as Techdirt's Michael Masnick points out in the article, access the video from Hulu's web site, and thus don't engage in all the nasty revenue stealing that serial embedders do. In fact, Boxee is looking at a subscription model of its own, partly with an eye toward paying content provider for premium access to their libraries.

That's why the Boxee folks argue that, since 1) they're accessing Hulu via a browser interface instead of just embedding video on their own site; 2) Boxee serves no ads anywhere in its interface, ever; 3) Hulu's ads are embedded within the videos and thus not lost when Boxee includes their content; and 4) they're looking at paid content delivery models--just like Hulu--there's no reasonable basis for prohibiting Boxee from including Hulu in their offerings.

It sounds to me--and I'm by no means an expert on the details--that Hulu just wants all the money it can get, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. After all, they want to avoid charging viewers for as long as they can, and that's why they're setting up distribution deals where they can, and to turn a profit that they're not quite turning on ad sales alone. And, since Hulu's models is arguably the future of television, for better or worse, it's important that Congress and, really, the world, looks closely at their successes and failures.

Not to mention the fact that if and when their merger with Comcast goes through, the cable giant will own a huge physical content delivery infrastructure as well as NBC's content creation arm and Hulu's internet content delivery system.

That kind of consolidation, while it may not violate any laws or portend any ill intent on Comcast's part (benefit-of-the-doubt alert...), warrants substantive conversation about the consumption models that will be available to consumers. It therefore, in this humble blogger's opinion, behooves us all to pay close attention in the coming months.

Hopefully, we'll see some of the negotiations to which NBC claimed they are open in their testimony--which, by the way, Boxee refutes, implying that they've been given the cold shoulder before--and those negotiations will lead to a system that works for both parties. Even if it costs consumers some money, the convenience of anywhere, anytime web delivery of television content seems infinitely more valuable than a television anchored to one or two licensed cable connections in your home.

A good primary source for information on this issue as the merger progresses through regulatory hurdles is C-SPAN's Archives. You can drill down to Comcast coverage using their Cable Television tag.

This was cross-posted at The Rotten Word.