IP: Piracy concerns may make older digital TV sets obsolete

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Note: Intel, which provides the authentication and encryption, effectively
ends home recording -- its licensing agreement prohibits putting DVI
connectors on any device capable of recording, such as a TiVo or digital
VCR.

Piracy concerns may make older digital TV sets obsolete
NEW TECHNOLOGY ADDRESSES STUDIOS' INSISTENCE ON COPYRIGHT PROTECTION
By Dawn C. Chmielewski
Mercury News

 

Greg Brooks isn't the typical early adopter. He's pragmatic and when the
family television died in 1999, he decided to splurge on a big-screen set
capable of displaying vivid, cinematic movies in high definition.

``I bought it for the future opportunities,'' said Brooks.

The half-life of Brooks' 60-inch Sony TV just got cut radically short.

He is one of the 2 1/2 million people who spent upward of $4 billion on
next-generation digital television sets over the past five years who may
find their pricey displays practically worthless, as the consumer
electronics industry attempts to address Hollywood's concerns about piracy.

The latest digital sets will feature copy protection that eliminates the
consumer's ability to record pay-per-view movies, or restricts the number of
copies they can make of shows broadcast in digital. These new technologies
give studios the wherewithal to withhold its most valuable cinematic content
from consumers watching on first-generation sets -- or require satellite and
cable companies to cut the resolution in half through a technique called
``downresing.''

At issue is a perceived flaw in first-generation digital sets that's come to
be known as the ``analog hole.'' Every digital TV set sold to consumers
since the digital television revolution began in 1997 comes with component
video inputs. These analog connectors allow video to flow, unencrypted, from
a cable or satellite set-top box to the television monitor.

Therein lies the security breach.

Anyone can tap into this video source to make pristine copies of digital
movies or TV shows that won't degrade with each reproduction. These perfect
digital duplicates can be uploaded and distributed infinitely over the
Internet.

A fear of Napster-like piracy makes major studios reluctant to deliver films
to the home in high-definition television format. That has led to a dearth
of the high-definition films and television programming that was to propel
the digital TV revolution.

Walt Disney Chairman Michael Eisner lobbied Congress to plug the ``analog
hole,'' and thwart global piracy on file-swapping services such as Morpheus
and Kazaa.

``We have no problem with customers making a time-shifting copy of broadcast
and cable programming in their own home,'' said Preston Padden, Disney's
executive vice president of government relations. ``Our problem is when the
brand new, $100-million movie shows up in a digitally perfect copy on
file-sharing Web sites.''

The resulting Consumer Broadband and Digital TV Act of 2002, introduced in
March by Sen. Ernest ``Fritz'' Hollings, D-S.C., would require copy
protection be built into any chip-smart consumer device that touches a song,
movie or other copyrighted work.

The threat of Congress mandating a copy control standard -- much as it did
with VCRs -- spurred the consumer electronics and information technology
industries into self-defensive action.

The resulting remedies may leave early digital TV adopters out in the snow.

Digital TVs just reaching the market -- including Sony's flat-screen Wega
and models from RCA -- feature a new Digital Video Interface that makes it
impractical -- and illegal -- to copy digital broadcasts of TV shows or
movies. This new plug is designed to bridge the short, here-to-fore
unencrypted distance a video signal travels between the set-top box and the
digital monitor. It delivers such a torrent of uncompressed video that it
can only be recorded on $100,000 high-bandwidth commercial recorders. And
Intel, which provides the authentication and encryption, effectively ends
home recording -- its licensing agreement prohibits putting DVI connectors
on any device capable of recording, such as a TiVo or digital VCR.

``The consumer is losing out, because by adopting DVI as their digital
connection, they are forfeiting any future right to record or network their
home theater products,'' said Robert Perry, marketing vice president for
Mitsubishi Consumer Electronics America, the nation's leading maker of
projection TVs.

Mitsubishi has refused to add DVI or CDMI inputs to its big-screen TVs,
instead adopting 1394-FireWire-iLink standard that has its roots in the
computer networking industry. This video input incorporates another form of
copy protection, the Digital Transmission Copy Protection protocol (known as
5C) from Intel, that allows for more flexible home-copying.

The next iteration of DVI technology, jointly developed by Intel and
Sunnyvale chip maker Silicon Image, would extend copy protection to digital
audio -- as well as video.

Silicon Image's initiative announced last week was warmly endorsed by
Universal and 20th Century Fox studios -- and the nation's leading direct
satellite broadcasters, Echostar and DirecTV, which are still starved for
digital content.

``Hollywood loves it because it's damned hard to record unless you're
sitting at a broadcast center. It's got HDCP, Intel's method of
copy-protection, so even if you're able to hack it, record it and compress
it, you've still got to deal with copy-protection,'' said Dave Arland,
spokesman for Thomson Multimedia, maker of RCA-brand televisions.

The new digital encryption schemes finally give Echostar the technological
ability to address Hollywood's file-swapping fixation: It can prevent
copying of pay-per-view films, restrict the number of copies of popular
shows, like ``Friends.'' It can remotely shut analog outputs to halt
unauthorized copying. And it can even cut in half the resolution of
high-definition programming delivered to first-generation HDTVs with analog
inputs that lack encryption.

Echostar hopes its anti-piracy initiatives will give broadcasters and
studios the confidence to augment the DishNetwork's high definition lineup,
now limited to HBO and Showtime, CBS's prime-time lineup and six monthly
pay-per-view movies.


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