Thomson's Vision: Smart Cards For Everything

ideaspin writes: "Thomson Multimedia is pushing the adoption of its smart card technology (SmartRight) in all kinds of devices ranging from TVs to PCs and set-top boxes -- basically, anything that might play digital media. Information Week has an article about it as does Webnoize(subscription only). This doesn't smell like something that would survive on the PC and consumers aren't going to be thrilled about the restrictions that such technology will bring -- no recording, limited archivability, no sharing and additional hardware for every viewing device. Interesting thing is that they are trying to convince the government to require the computer industry to adopt such a standard. Along with the copy protection schemes built into portable media and hard drives, this is one of the many ways that they are trying to lock down 'rogue' PC devices."

Comments

I really can't see this working

[Dr_Cheeks]

Thomson are just one of several manufacturers - I don't care how many units they've slod - it's just a drop in the ocean. So they sell stuff with content protection and hype it big-time. Other companies jump on the bandwagon with similar but non-compatible schemes cos they're bigger than Thomson and don't want to pay to licence their tech. A standards committee is set up, who might come up with something in 5 years that no-one pays attention to.

Some people buy it. That's right, some people will give up their rights if a snazzy advert tells them to.

Other people go - what, so I've got to replace all the TVs, VCRs, DVD players and PCs in my house with ones that conform to this one format (and since there's several competing ones it's difficult to pick which one to go with), and I have to pay extra for the privalige. Hmm, no, I don't think that sounds like a reasonable deal.

Mean time, there'll be a small manufacturer or two, who can't afford to produce something like this, and go on producing un-restricted platforms. Which everyone starts to buy.

Joe Public may not care too much about violations of his rights, but he doesn't want to have people try to restrict how he watches TV. You can supress minorities (Linux users & DeCSS), but if you try to stop everyone you're going to have a lot of problems. Will Joe Public vote again for his seanator if his seanator restricts his cable? Nope. So government are going to be reluctant to pass this too. Nice try Thomson.