ACA Wants Action on Evolution's HD Box Waiver

The American Cable Association (ACA) has a message for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and its lack of action on Evolution Digital LLC's still-pending request for a waiver on an HD-capable Digital Terminal Adapter (DTA): Let's get this show on the road, people!

ACA president and CEO Matthew Polka made his plea via a letter to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, noting that Evolution's original petition was filed about eight months ago and has not yet been placed on public notice.

Although the FCC has granted multiple waivers for standard-def DTAs -- which are being used by several operators to free up analog spectrum for HDTV, video-on-demand, and Docsis 3.0 services -- the ACA says the availability of low-cost HD versions are also growing in importance to small- and mid-sized MSOs, which face competition from satellite TV operators that provide larger HDTV programming lineups. The ACA also says the independent operators it represents are generally hard-pressed to buy more expensive CableCARD-based HD boxes.

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Evolution, the first vendor to obtain a waiver for SD-DTAs, is seeking a three-year pass on its HD version. If it's successful in obtaining that waiver, it would prevent MSOs from having to seek out such waivers on their own. (See FCC Believes in Evolution-ary DTAs and Evolution Guns for HD Box Waiver .)

Evolution president Brent Smith told Light Reading Cable that the company's HD-DTA, which uses Conax AS security, "is fully ready for commercial deployment, and [we] already have some orders in hand." Without the waiver, Evolution has been targeting the device to private cable and "institutional markets" (colleges, university campuses, and hotels) that don't require CableCARDs.

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