The movie studios have a new Holy Grail, it seems: Federal Communications Commission permission to cable companies to shut down the analog streams on video-on-demand movie programming. As Ars readers know, we've been covering this issue for a while. But the Motion Picture Association of America's latest letter to the FCC pulls out all the stops, rhetoric-wise, calling criticisms of this scheme "complete and utter nonsense that only can be intended to stir up baseless fears among consumers that their equipment will suddenly go dark and be unusable for any purpose."

These are "deplorable claims," the MPAA told the FCC on Monday. Plus they "distort the truth." They're also "simply and irrefutably untrue," the trade association adds (in case you didn't get it yet).

False untruthfulness

The main target of MPAA's outrage is the advocacy group Public Knowledge, one of whose spokespersons, Harold Feld, has an ongoing video series called "Five Minutes With Harold Feld," in which the aforementioned offers his takes on "incredibly boring and wonky things" and tries "to make them slightly less boring, because this stuff is important." The allegedly offensive five-minute video in question deals with what MPAA wants, which is technically called "Selectable Output Control"—shutting down the analog stream to HDTVs and other devices because it is less secure (copyable) than digital streams, which can be scrambled. The FCC currently prohibits the practice.

The studios say they want to plug the "analog hole" with SOC because it will allow them to offer the public pre-DVD VoD movie releases with less threat of piracy. The problem, as Feld's video on this subject points out, is that a considerable amount of analog only connected equipment won't be able to receive these offerings. "And for this," Feld skeptically declares, "we're going to break 25 million television sets, and break your TiVO, and break your Slingbox, and make sure you can't use it on VoD anymore, because [Feld looking especially skeptical here] it's so important to get these movies to video-on-demand earlier."

Feld's "deplorable claims" are "absolutely, 100 percent untrue," MPAA counters. "The use of SOC would have no impact whatsoever on the ability of existing television sets, Tivos, Slingboxes or any other consumer product to work in exactly the same fashion that such devices work today. While products with only unprotected outputs and inputs would not be able to receive the new early window offerings that would be made possible by the SOC waiver, no device would be broken. Nor would any consumer be unable to receive traditional VOD in the same way that he or she does today."

A considerable amount of time in this debate is being spent rather theatrically denouncing words that clearly function as metaphors. As we've pointed out, although SOC won't render analog-only HDTVs and other home theater equipment "broken," as in "physically damaged with wires poking out of the set," it will disable the ability of this gear to access what will immediately become the most valuable offering on television: pre-DVD release VoD movies.

What's the problem anyway?

The rest of MPAA's filing is a long list of ways that movies are copied and illegally distributed on the Internet—further proof positive that the studios need SOC. Among other claims, the filing insists that real time duplication of HBO per-per-view events on various websites represents clear evidence that "thieves steal this content through unprotected outputs."

From this litany, a disinterested reader might conclude that Hollywood's efforts to stop this activity have been amazingly unsuccessful, and the producers might want to reconsider their approach to the problem. MPAA, for example, decries the fact that "literally every DVD that MPAA member studios released for rental or purchase during the past year has been made available for unlawful downloading or streaming online."

If that is the case, why does the MPAA extol the virtues of its DVD Content Scramble System (CSS) before the United States Copyright Office? CSS and other "protection technologies" have allowed content producers to "distribute their valuable content in higher quality, more convenient digital formats," MPAA wrote in the office's latest proceeding on exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. As a result, "DVDs have become one of the most widely adopted consumer electronics products in history, and the pace of adoption has been unprecedented. Consumers have greater access to movies and TV shows than ever before."

It doesn't seem to matter. In Hollywood-think on this issue, the solution to each apparent technology/regulation failure is a new tech fix that requires new rules and a new explanation of why it won't hurt consumers. TV watchers, MPAA notes, are already used to not seeing stuff on their cable boxes. So what's the problem?

"A typical subscriber today already encounters numerous instances where a particular channel or service is not available. For example, a given consumer might not subscribe to a cable company’s high-definition service or might not receive premium channels (such as HBO). In either case, if consumers were to attempt to access one of these channels, they would receive an on-screen message advising them that their service does not include access to the requested content."

MPAA goes so far as to suggest that if SOC isn't granted, individual movie studios will begin releasing pre-DVD content on non-cable distribution alternatives—such as SONY's experiments with encrypted Internet streams sent directly to its Bravia HDTVs (Hancock already streams and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs is coming next). Thus, the trade group warns, "it is denial of the waiver that could result in a scenario in which millions of consumers would have to buy new equipment to receive new content offerings." That is, of course, assuming that consumers would bother to do so, given the enormous amount of content they can already get over the 'Net.

Not-so-subtle

Needless to say, Public Knowledge is taking strong exception to statements that pretty much call the group a pack of liars. MPAA's latest commentary "utterly fails to demonstrate that anybody steals content through the analog hole," PK's Gigi Sohn declared in a commentary published this morning. And "by attacking Public Knowledge and specifically Harold's integrity, it is a not-so-subtle effort to spin the debate over this waiver as 'copyleft' Public Knowledge versus 'reasonable' Hollywood, which only wants this itsy bitsy waiver so that it can provide the 'pro-consumer' benefit of making movies available on video on demand a few weeks earlier than they are now."

Sohn notes that a wide variety of organizations besides PK oppose SOC, including the Consumer Electronics Association and the Independent Film and Television Alliance. No one knows how much their concerns count with the new FCC, which has yet to take a stand on this controversial issue.