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Will We Need A SmartCard to Watch Digital TV?
An anonymous reader writes "This story on EE Times points out that Hollywood and major electronics manufacturers are in agreement on a SmartCard requirement for digital video interconnectivity. Note that the article talks about them 'closing the analog hole.'"
I wonder if the satellite cracking guys might have a solution to this "speed bump" in, oh, about 45 seconds after release?
Sounds like these folks need to read Cringley's "Curtain Call" article and stop wasting so much effort on things that are doomed to fail.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
Specifically:
- I want to be able to view anything on any device.
- I also want at least some capability to make a single copy. If this is limited to 1 generation, then this will be acceptable to me, but possibly not to everyone.
- I want to be able to record any broadcast for later viewing. Including Pay Per view.
-
This must not be location limited at all.
It is not my concern that the media cartels have a business model that divides the world into regions. It is possible to make a profit without region control. They should adapt their business model to what the consumer (i.e. me) wants."Will We Need A SmartCard to Watch Digital TV?"
Will I need to buy a Digital TV if they make it too hard for me to watch? Seriously, all this 'flags' crap makes me want to avoid it all together.
TV needs me, I don't need TV. Without my eyeballs on the commercials, they aren't making money. They should consider that before they try pushing restrictions I don't want.
and I quote: Other problems remain, though. For example, some insiders say Hollywood studios are demanding that the DVB copy protection group consider a way to add geographic limitations to where content, once legally obtained by a consumer, can be viewed. The plan is similar to an unpopular regional coding scheme used for DVD content scrambling
What does this have to do with piracy? Nothing, they use piracy as an excuse (and remember piracy is not a legal term, it's called copyright infringement) to help maintain a failing busines model. They want to control how and when people consume media, under the guise of protecting the consumer from the dangers of pir^H^H^H unauthorized consumption of copyrighted content.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
And fail miserably. Seriously, if DTV replaces analog in 2006, I will eat my hat.
sulli
RTFJ.
The only way to truely close the analog hole is to not have any analog information. That means our eyes get pulled out or supplimented with digital receivers because that last step in any system is a analog transmision from the screen to our eyes. Any flags that get set to no copy well not be there in that step and a camera aimed and synced with the TV could record it and turn it back to a digital form free of what ever flags were set.
OK, so the mice vote to bell the cat. What if the cat (that is, the "consumer") ain't buying? People are already not-buying digital TV in droves. The FCC is going to hate it, but even they are unlikely to be able to force the shutdown of analog TV under current conditions, and use-crippling technology isn't going to help at all.
There is no such thing as 'closing the analog hole.' No matter what scheme you use to protect your content, it *has* to be decrypted somewhere. And then some enterprising team will take apart the decryption mechanism, figure out how it works, and build a stand-alone decryption box.
It needs to be done, if only because people have been spending thousands and thousands of dollars on flat-panel TVs, HDTVs, etc. and they're all loath to buy another one anytime soon.
I had a point but I forgot what it was, so I'd better stop now.
the coolest club on
and people will not use it.
I uess paper books will be the next target of this "analog hole"
so once people decide to stop watching TV, and begin to read more books, the publishing industry will begin to fase out paper books in favor of e-books....got to close that analog hole right.
wooo...now we will have a new underclass, those who can not afford electronic equipment...
will content publishers learn that when they try to keep control over the published information that it looses all value becasue no one wants to buy there crap? no, they will not and this is what will send us into the next dark age.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
As long as Americans continue to keep their media-created, instiable appetite for broadcast video and audio, this will work.
Why not unplug? Listen to the radio, read a book, go for a walk..
What's so special about Law & Order, Pay-per-View Heart concerts, and even, dare, I say, the Discovery Channel? Go to a library, INTERACT WITH PEOPLE. The only reason that the population will turn into a mob of wallscreen-watching zombies is if we decide to.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
The day HDTV and SmartCards become a requirement is probably the day we stop watching TV shows altogether, though we'll likely keep the TV around for watching movies and playing games and the like. I don't know who they think they're kidding, but the crap they're trying to protect just isn't worth this kind of annoyance.
Case in point - Why do we need 14 channels of HBO in our cable package -- is it so we have more choice? No, it's because exclusivity deals and vertical ownership mean they have to be a Time-Warner billboard. Oh, that and the movies suck, so they have to have 14 channels of it to make it seem like you're getting your money's worth. When I was a kid, we got 1 HBO channel, but they ran primo movies every night, and it was generally worth the subscription fee. Now, it's 14 channels of Sex&City reruns and crap movies from the 80's and (early)90's. Screw them. Don't **EVEN** get me started on "Slowtime" - the premium cable network for morons and the terminally horny.
Now they want me to get a smart card and an encryption ID key for the priviledge of watching Will & Grace? Sorry. I'll do without - It's more fun playing with my wife anyway.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
I absolutely see your point, and I'm definitely a free-speech advocate, but I'm also a somewhat old geezer who remembers the days before "convergence" was a buzzword. The fact that my work-related computing choices are tied up with the entertainment industry's policies at all, is galling to me. There are days when I wish they'd come up with a fool-proof, unbreakable way to keep commercial music and video inseparably tied to special industry-approved hardware, and then leave my computers the f2k alone.
Cantankerous old coot since 1957.
Americans love their television. Not even
God can save a Congressmen who lets
smartcards come between Americans and their
free television.
With a few exceptions here and there, commercial e-book operations have been a financial failure. There's a lot of conjecture floating around as to why no one seems to want these e-books. My own conjecture is that its due to the simple fact that people don't want to pay more for less (in a rational universe, this would go without saying for anyone with any business sense.)
Its too early so say for sure, but I see the possibility of the same thing happening here. Even leaving aside issues like playing media on Linux desktops, if Joe Sixpack can't do all the same stuff with this newfangled digital technology that he could do before with the old, if it is inconvenient to him, if he is getting less for the same money or more, he ain't gonna want it.
Here in the states, this is not how it was supposed to work. The expectation with digital TV was that it would be a broadcast medium, and the spectrum is considered to be operated by broadcasters who are operating as a public trustee. This is how it's supposed to work in theory. We have been promised a range of services, from high definition broadcasting, which is just taking off, to simulcasting up to four channels over the expanded bandwidth (which is what our local PBS station said they wanted to do). Now comes $Hollywood and their demand to be in charge of this technology. If I want just movies and don't mind paying for the privilege of getting them, I'll subscribe to cable and HBO. I don't want that, I want expanded programming choices and a much improved signal. This is what digital TV was supposed to deliver, not another channel for the content providers to extract more quid from viewers.
Always look on the briight side of life! (whistle, whistle)
... and pick up a book.
The cards will be cracked, cloned, whatever. They should see what is going on outside their own borders.
I'm sure you're right. Here's why I think you'll always be right:
Content protection for broadcast media is a fundamentally hard problem. Other smart card systems can make use of key diversification and card blacklists to limit the damage that can be caused by breaking one card. The idea is that in a system where every card has its own, unique keys, stealing the secrets from one card only allows you to duplicate that card, so if the system can recognize and blacklist duplicate cards relatively quickly, crackers will give up because it's just too much work for too little gain.
For broadcast systems, though, there's a problem: every card (or at least large sets of cards) has to have the same keys, because you can't generate a different data stream for each card. At best you can encrypt the datastream with time-varying keys and have a separate keystream consisting of a zillion copies of the current datastream key, each encrypted under a different card key. Scale that up to a large system with tens of millions of subscribers, though, and you either need vast bandwidth just for the keystream (keep in mind that in practice there are a bunch of different datastreams, all of which must be keyed independently so you can sell different channel), or you need to make some cards with duplicate keys (actually, a possible way to address this just ocurred to me... but there's probably a flaw in it).
If some legitimate cards are duplicates, then you can't blacklist illegitimate duplicates without killing paying customers, and pissing off paying customers is very bad business. Not to mention the fact that in a broadcast environment, it's fairly difficult to *identify* illegal duplicates. In most other smart card systems there is a back channel for sending data to a central system where it can be correlated to look for anomalies. Such auditing is a crucial part of most secure smart card systems.
Building secure smart card systems (like building any secure systems) isn't about making smart cards completely impenetrable, because no real-world system or device ever is (particularly not when you place a key component of the system in an attacker's unsupervised hands!), it's about structuring things so that the cost of breaking the card exceeds the likely benefit. In most environments, this is feasible, and, hence, smart cards are useful secure tokens. In broadcast content protection, however, many of the techniques used to limit the benefit of breaking a card are simply unavailable. And where benefit exceeds cost by a significant margin, someone will surely see a business opportunity...
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Good luck Hollywood! Please, this time around keep track of how much you spend on these shenanegins vs how much you save. Be realistic about how much money "piracy of television" is really costing you. I, for one, just don't see any hope of this paying off, and I don't want to have to go through this again when you fail to learn your lesson. If my $1500 HD-ready TV isn't adaptable to the new system, I'm going to chuck it through your window and demand my money back.
What this means for consumers is simple: No matter what the sales clerk tells you, and no matter how much you spend on a fancy digital ready monitor or plasma display today, there will never be a tuner that puts out a signal that your expensive monitor will accept at the high definition resolutions you want and expect. Buy now and you will be screwed! Once they figure out how to copy protection hobble the system, then and only then will you be able to get a display that might someday display the full promise of DTV, but unless you plan on being part of a massive class action consumer lawsuit, stay away from any new equipment until they figure out how they are going to cripple the equipment you pay for.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Hey,
:)
I got satellite TV last week. I won't say the brand (don't accuse me of advertising) but suffice it to say it was one of the two major players.
Picture quality: best I've ever seen. Far better than cable (analog) and far, far, *far* better than the crappy digital cable we here have in San Francisco (Thanks AT&T-crapola).
Restrictions: NONE!!!
I purchased a PVR that has no monthly fee - and I can record to outside devices such as VCR without macrovision - even from the PVR recorded content.
Now - I just got this last week - but must say: I'm 110% very happy with it. So flame away, but I'm sure that as soon as they *force* us on to digital TV, and *force* us not to record shows (hmmm - any TIVO fans???) there will be mass exodus from the evil *them* and people will start using alternatives.
Other thoughts: how about TV via DSL/other broadband in 5-10 years??? I think it's possible. Satellite - definitely possible.
For those of you who will flame that they "don't have access to satellite" due to landlords or physical space considerations - I'm sorry & just like many of us look for broadband with our next apartments/homes, I'll be looking for a clear view to the south
"If some legitimate cards are duplicates, then you can't blacklist illegitimate duplicates without killing paying customers, and pissing off paying customers is very bad business."
Couldn't prove it by me. Two recent examples:
DishTV (relevent, I think). I moved across the street. After reinstalling, aiming my dishes, and running the cable, was only able to hit two of the three birds I pay to get, and those only on one of two receivers I pay for. After many calls to their tech support, many frustrating hours of trying different LNBF's and switches (on the advice of their tech support reps), I threatened to go to DirectTV with their free install/two receiver deal. The service rep pretty much said "That's your decision. Go for it."
White Castle. Yeah, the belly bomb place. They recently decided that it's too much trouble to put mustard on your hamburger for you. But they'll happily provide you with mustard packets. One of the neat things about White Castle hamburgers is that they're easy to handle in the truck for lunch on the go. Ever try and open a mustard packet and put it on a hamburger while you're driving? (And the mustard in the packets just isn't as good as what they put on in the store.) THEIR reply when I flat out stated I wouldn't be back until they changed this policy? "We've made this decision because it was taking too long to serve our customers. We hope it doesn't affect your purchasing habits with us." Sounds like a training problem to me. I haven't been back since, and they probably haven't noticed.
Oh, and don't even get me started on the Kroger card, lol. They probably don't miss my business either.
Radical notion -- opt out.
Step one - realize that you are NOT the consumer for broadcast entertainment -- you are the product. The consumer is the advertiser, the "content" is the vehicle for delivering the product (you) to the consumer.
Step two -- get sick of being sold
Step three -- look at your "favorite shows" in a whole new light
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