Hollywood hopes to hobble home video recording hardware

April 8, 2004

Movie studios are
paranoid about the high definition TV signals on the horizon. Hollywood
wants future consumer electronics limited in how video files can be moved
between devices that can pick up, record and transfer digital TV signals. It has
the potential to screw up home networking- a brave new frontier for us
multimedia enthusiasts. Plus, there is a big push to do away with analog
connections as they are hard to manipulate. Here is a snip from a good coverage
of this issue at C|Net. The audacity of some of these businessmen is
startling.

Goodbye
analog?
The pending ruling also has the potential to cripple
the familiar analog plugs that are used to connect virtually all consumer
electronics devices today, with an explicit eye toward phasing them out
altogether.

The FCC is currently mulling
both sides' arguments on the issues, without a scheduled date to make its
decision.

Content companies don't like
these older connections, because they are less able to support antipiracy
features. In the HDTV realm, they want to be able to limit the pristine
pictures to the copy-protected digital outputs, sending a lower-quality
signal out the older plugs.

Studios say this would be
used only for new services, such as video on-demand, and that the
"downrezzing" would be almost imperceptible with today's generation of
televisions, many of which only have analog inputs. Newer televisions
would certainly have the digital plugs and so would not be affected, the
content companies say.

"We think that downrezzing is
important to provide an incentive for consumers...to purchase equipment
that has digital inputs," the MPAA's Attaway said. "That's important,
because it hastens the transition" to all-digital television.

Again, consumer groups say
that's inequitable, because analog inputs and outputs are ubiquitous on
today's equipment and are unlikely to disappear anytime soon.

"They want to get rid of
analog because they can't control it," Godwin
said.

Studios also want another feature called
"selectable output control" added to new devices supporting digital cable. The
reason is to give them unprecedented control over how content is passed
between devices. Here is how it works: Say a hacker somewhere
breaks a particular copyright protection and it is no longer
considered secure by the industry. They want the ability to be able to turn
off hardware outputs as a second line of defense. For instance, you
could suddenly be unable to play back shows from your TiVo digital recorder
on your HDTV because someone figured out how to break a protection. Now, wouldn't that be a nice incentive for hackers to cause
a ruckus? Read the whole story at C|Net.

Source: C|Net