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Sony Introduces Passage
UncleCrispy writes "Sony, a newcomer in the cable industry announced its new technology, Passage, on the opening day of the BroadBand Plus Show to the receptive ears of the cable community. "Sony's Passage Technology is a simple, elegant solution that allows equipment from multiple vendors to peacefully co-exist on legacy digital CATV networks"
Now you won't be stuck with the SetTopBox your cable provider forces on you, but with Passage you should be able to go to the store and buy any box you want. If you want a DVR box, you can buy it, and you'll no longer be stuck with the rental fees.
Sounds like it's a good deal for the cable providers and consumers, but how will current SetTopBox monopolies take the news?"
Is that really so? Maybe I misunderstood the whitepaper but to me it seemed like the main benefit would be that you can now make multiple set top boxes co-exist. The cable provider may still force you to buy their preffered STB also (by encryption for example) - but now you don't have to buy that only :) Or...
Maybe I misunderstood it completely, if so, could someone explain the concept more clearly than the whitepaper does :)
Now Sony is protecting us from those evil American Empires Motorola and Scientific/Atlanta, as well as that nasty Canadian robber baron Videotron, as well as all those evil Korean STB monopolies? Um, Ok, great. Thanks.
Next time, will somebody please circulate a memo reminding us from whom we need saving? I'm losing track.
Also, this is not a consumer product. The Western Show where Sony made it's announcement is a Cable Operators Trade Show, a Comdex for the head-end and pole-climbing set. You can't walk into your local Radio Shack or Circuit Shack, buy a spiffy Sony Passage sitting up there on a shelf next to their Vaio's and PS2's, take it home, and give your Motorola box back to Comcast.
The key to understanding the role of the Passage, as I take it from following the links provided, is that the technology enables cable operators to purchase and deploy the 3 NEW SONY STB's ALSO BEING ANNOUNCED at the show. It would seem to allow a plant with existing S/A or Motorola infrastructure to hopskotch around their implied commitment to deploy S/A or Motorola boxes in the home, and use the new Sony STBs instead. The roll-out is presumed rather painless as well, as the Passage seems to allow old school and new Sony boxes to co-exist for an infinite time.
Of course, the technology economics of cable head ends are all balanced among the one-time-only cost of the legacy headend gear, and the presumed-to-be-ever-growing costs of the franchise build-out and additional STBs. For this reason, companies such as Motorola and S/A are typically inclined to provide sweet deals on the former encoder "razors," cuz they know the real money is to be made on the latter STB "blades." Sony wet-blankets those economics now. I'm sure the immediate fall-out of Passage will be a re-wording of a lot of their rivals' sales agreements locking low costs for the head-end gear into commitments for minimum STB purchases.
More business for the lawyers. More meetings for the salesguys. But none of this effects a consumer's "choice." You'll take whatever your cable company puts on top of your TV, end of story.
A better example would be Sky in the UK. You cannot view encrypted Sky DTH satellite broadcasts unless you buy a specific Sky branded receiver. This limits the viewer to a range of "approved" boxes which differ very little in basic specification.
In Europe, viewers can purchase a generic DVB-S decoder with the features they want and then plug in the required encryption module (similar to a PCMCIA card) for the encryption standard that their chosen provider uses.
The UK situation will hopefully change next year as the European Union is forcing all broadcasters to move to the modular system, which will mean that Sky will have to release an encryption module for those generic boxes.
No.
The way the CA system is proposed to work is to leave the majority of the packets in an MPEG stream unencrypted, but to encrypt "critical" ones. Frame headers, Slice headers etc, I guess. That way you can have the majority (99%) of the video stream in the clear, but the video is still unwatchable. To this, the cable operator takes *two* copies of the critical blocks, and encrypts them with the two different CA keys. The STB can decrypt either of the two sets of critical blocks to get the original, complete stream back.
The more bandwidth you allocate to the Passage system, the more blocks can be counted as "critical" and the better the security. It's not a DRM thing.
I work in the Digital TV / Set-Top-Box marketplace, and all I can say is that very few people really understand all the jargon being used here. Certainly the result of a combination of specialized and complex technology with marketing gone mad :-)
I'll try to explain it in simpler terms though, and I hope this will help everyone here understand what Passage really is, and why it's not so hot for the consumer. Imagine that you decide to broadcast a new TV channel when all you've got is a *big* pile of money; i.e. you have no previous experience or contacts in the field, you do not own cables, satellites, or anything of the sort. You can become an "operator" if you find the following items:
you'll send digital signals, which means that your viewers will need a special set-top-box (named "STB" for short) to descramble your signal and view it on their TV.
if your channel is not free, the STB will need some sort of "card reader" to identify each subscriber and control which programs they're allowed to watch. This is called "conditional access", or "CA" for short
a STB "recognizes" your signal from all those that it receives from the cable or satellite through a unique ID. You'll need to reserve one or more of such IDs, as well as bandwith, to your carriers (i.e. cable or satellite operators)
you need to produce and send your signal to your carrier. The signal contains video, as well as other kind of data, like the encrypted list of valid subscribers along with their individual rights, that you'll periodically insert in the stream, or the list of programs to come this week
This is done with specialized hardware (e.g. MPEG compressors, multiplexers), as well as specialized software written to drive everything. All of this costs a *lot* of money, and is called the "head-end".
Several companies on the market are able to provide you with "turn-key" solutions, which include everything from deals with STB manufacturers (like Pace, Philips, Sony, Thomson Multimedia, etc...) to TV production studios. All you have to do is pay some cash, and they'll choose everything for you and make all critical technical choices.
Now, consider the following:
there are several competing CA technologies on the market today. They differ on the way they scramble the video signal and subscriber access rights, and much more importantly, on the way they encrypt and protect user identification on each "access card".
each CA technology specifies a card reader technology, a card manufacturing technology, a digital file format to store the access rights, and specialized software to encode your subscribers list, which generally comes straight from a big database (like an Oracle one). This means that changing your CA technology is not possible unless you change all of your STBs and your costly head-end. This is by no means trivial.
A typical STB has about 60 distinct devices to control, and its software is a very complex thing that must be able to drive everything, while controlling video and running application, like the electronic program guide, or even Java applets in certain cases.
This software is generally not written by the STB manufacturer, but by a specialized company, like NDS, OpenTV, Canal+ Technologies, etc... In theory, these companies must be able to adapt their software to various CA technologies. In practice, they all implement a single CA technology that they either designed themselves or licensed from another party. These companies also develop specialized head-ends that only work with their technologies.
the format of the data contained in your signal is not standardized yet. It is thus only determined by your head-end and STB software. The only thing that these various formats share is the fact that they encode all video using an MPEG-2 codec, all other data varies tremendously except that they're mostly embedded in an MPEG transport stream. Some experiments with MPEG-4 video codecs are currently being performed, by the way...
All this means that operators cannot easily change the technology they're using to broadcast once they've selected one. There is no monopoly since several competing technologies exist for both CA and STB/Head-end software, provided by distinct companies. However, there is a lock-in once you've signed one of these "solutions".
It's really diffcult to know what "Passage" really is from the Sony brochure. It seems clear that it incorporates a migration tool that can be used by operators to smoothly switch to "better" technology without changing everything immediately. However, what these "best technologies" are is left unexplained. It may be that the tool is flexible enough to adapt to anything new, but I would doubt it. I rather supposed that it will only be used to switch to Sony-approved STB+Head-End software :-)
As for consumers, this will change absolutely nothing since they will not be able to choose their STB, except from the models "approved" by their TV operator(s).