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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.'"
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.
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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.
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.
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
Americans love their television. Not even
God can save a Congressmen who lets
smartcards come between Americans and their
free television.
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.
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.
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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