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Is The Public Stuck With The Broadcast Flag?
peeping_Thomist writes "The only company that sells HDTV tuner cards for Linux has run out of cards to sell, and they are now missing deadlines for new getting new cards. Linux users who want to view and record HDTV face an uphill battle. Meanwhile, the dreaded July 1, 2005 deadline for manufacturing DRM-free HDTV tuners is fast approaching. MythTV supports HDTV tuner cards, but so far no one has made a move to, as the EFF puts it, "buy, build, and sell fully-capable, non-flag-compliant HDTV receivers" prior to the July 1 deadline. The current combination of MythTV and pcHDTV (assuming pcHDTV cards become available again) may, as the EFF says, be "great for geeks," but it is a far cry from the TIVO-esque simplicity a mass market demands. Unless someone can get bring a DRM-free hdtv recorder to market before the deadline, it seems the general public will have no chance to avoid the broadcast flag."
What would be a better time than now?
Since most of us on /. use Windows, are there any flag-free HDTV cards for it?
*Couldn't there be a startup project to get existing windows-compatible HDTV cards to work within Linux? I mean, there's a good sized community out there, and with the right motivation (recorded HD for all?) couldn't this be done?
As far as DRM-disabled tivos....I doubt it will happen....Even if someone rolled out one, no doubt it'd be stopped before it hit the shelves.....
*Disclaimer - I don't know much about HDTV cards..Know how they work and all, but I don't know what's available on the market.....
My MythTV HowTo
Europe doesn't have the broadcast flag (as of yet), right?
And HDTV is HDTV, right? A common standard, unlike NTSC and PAL, right?
So will we see Americans buying HDTV cards from Europe in the future?
Is there a chance this will go the same way as DVD region-protection?
These cards are going to same way as DVD's.
The market will demand DRM free cards to access media that is not copyrighted yet fails to play because of DRM restrictions.
We will see cards that can be reflashed, making us all criminals that do such, to be DRM free.
Go that market pressure.
The VAST majority of my friends and family visit in the "living room" of their house. You know, the one with the big television in it.
:p
Visiting consists mainly of watching the tube like zombies and discussing the commercials when they are on. If I suggest turning off the television I'm treated as if I'm incredibly rude, insane or both.
On the few occasions that the television is not present (for example, if we're *gasp* outside) the main topic of conversation is usually what is going on with the latest 'reality tv' shows.
It is truly pathetic.
And yes, I'm from the USA.
Folks,
I would really like to get the bottom line on whether these HDTV tuners are Broadcast-Flag compliant. (Of course, I want the answer to be "no" to all.)
ATI HDTV Wonder
DVICO FusionHDTV III
Hauppauge WinTV-HD
Itech AccessDTV
MIT MyHD MDP-120
pcHDTV HD-2000
Sasem OnAirUSB-HDTV
I pressed and pressed ATI support for an answer, and finally got them to say it DOESN'T respect the BF. I'm just not 100% sure I believe them.
Does anyone know about these??? How do we get a reliable answer? The listings on the EFF page don't explicitly say that they don't honor it...
Tom.
"agreed. TV is just boring. the only good thing is news and bbc.co.uk has that covered. anything else that's decent can be bought on DVD and watched when you want.
the benefit/cost of TV has been plummeting sharply for some time now."
Ah, but you are missing the point... what if DVD's go away and you are only "allowed" to watch DRM'd discs or downloads on a "per viewing" fee structure... and you couldn't make backups of the content (ok the DMCA ships already sailed, but still why let another one sail)
Right now PVRs/DVRs etc give you the advantage of watchign what you want, when you want... furthermore the problem isn't there's nothing worth watching, is that there's sooo much crap, on sooo many channels is that you need a willing guide (PVR) to help you sort through it... so when YOU are done mounting climbing for the day you can kick back, fire up your PVR and see all sorts of stuff that will interest you (no doubt Outdoor life network rugged how to "climb better shows" )and oh by the way zoom pass the commercials to nearly halve your coma couch time.
But back to the point of the article... you lose some of core abilities to manage content how you'd like (in the US) once it's been DRMd...
Between the broadcast flag, and the INDUCE act (oh and toss the patriot act in for good measure) we will soon (in the US) have less freedoms and transfer all the control to the MPAA/RIAA/etc...
all our content are belong to them.
blah
e.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
Sounds like a job for Gnu Radio...who needs a hardcoded tuner anyway!
Recent supreme court cases such as Morrison and Lopez stop federal regulation of activities that are "non-commercial." This means if nothing commercial is transpiring, the activity cannot be regulated under the commerce power (this is the same authority used to establish the flag in the first place.)
Open source software that is not sold, is freely available, and freely modifiable is very much non-commercial and therefore not subject to this regulation.
Thus, and IAAL (I get sworn in TOMOROW) but not a techie anymore, it seems that if there is any way to get a signal to your computer, a free, open source software program could render it - and no laws would be broken.
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
Don't be a victim to the broadcast flag -- be creative and make your own entertainment.
(Also beware of performing copyrighted scripts -- you're not even allowed to videotape such performances. Be creative in the script department as well.)
Well, there's always this, but I don't know what's happened in the past year or so...
I doubt that broadcast television will be around in 20 years as a mass market thing anyway.
:
My prediction is that it is going into a death spiral caused by the following
1) There are many other things to do that watch tv all evening unlike 20 years ago (dvd, internet, games for example)
2) The programs they are increasingly producing are aimed at the lowest common denominator to reduce costs and increase audience share for that program. But that's causing an increasing number of people to find *nothing* they want to watch at all.
3) It takes a few years of inertia for people who on't actually like any of the programs to realise this and turn off.
4) An older generation from 20-40 years ago who watched the peak of mass market tv are slowly being replaced by a younger audience who don't have that shared culture of watching tv every evening, instead gaming and the internet are important.
5) There are a lot more channels making it almost impossible to get huge audiences for any particular show.
6) As audiences drop the amount of money available to TV companies will drop. They'll panic and stop producing more fringe stuff and concentrate *even more* on the lowest common denominator stuff which is turning many people who don't like that stuff away.
7) As the audience drops more and increasing number of children who already have alternatives will not be "educated" in the culture of watching mass broadcast television.
I firmly belive that there is a death spiral here which is almost unavoidable. I predict that mass TV will have an audience reduced by at least 25% in 5-10 years time, and will have dropped to below 50% in 15 years time as todays children grow up without the culture of watching all that TV.
I can see television being a quaint old fashioned thing in 20 years time...
On the other hand I think that movies and DVDs and perhaps internet broadcast shows have a good future ahead of them. The demand for quality entertainment isn't going away and I believe that it won't be long before we start seeing produced for DVD shows happening that are never broadcast.
I really think standard market forces will help here. Currently plain-old-tv tuner cards are selling very well, because software support is very good and it works fine with standard cable or broadcast. And there are a few non-flag cards that are selling extremely well, partly because people want to get them before they're banned. So when they're banned, manufacturers will start making flag-enabled cards. About 10 people will buy them, and then they'll realize that they don't work (as the entertainment industry will surely abuse the flag), and they'll tell their friends, and the flag enabled cards simply won't sell. It's not necessary to boycot a useless product. So when plain old tv goes the way of black-and-white, all those hardware manufacturers will have a significant interest in changing the law. Once they succeed, the market for HDTV tuners will slowly recover - and perhaps hardware manufacturers will mistrust the entertainment industry a bit more, which i see as a good thing.
This is very nice, but the question is: how many would you be able to sell before your company was tied up in court, or if current trends continue, its officers (i.e. you) imprisoned?
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
But there is nothing good on over-the-air TV. Nothing. I can't name a single show that's watchable.
you are quite wrong.
We do not watch TV anymore, we watch ReplayTV. Jeremiah on HBO, Stargate and it's spin-off are great this season, with many films off of sundance and IFC are great. and for my deviant entertainment my weekly dose of "the venture brothers" from Cartoon network is an absolute hoot!.
add to that tons of other random things that can fill up a 200 hour Replay quickly, while increasing the quality of the TV medium greatly.
Televison is like a shortwave radio, you either need a lot of time or the right equipment to pick out the good signals from the background noise.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Would it not be possible to record the actual broadcast signal at the time of transmision, and then replay it in front of the HDTV equipement when you want? Would the DRM-enabled equipement have a way to know?
I realize that to sample the raw HDTV signal at double its frequency would require enormous amounts of storage available, but storage always becomes cheaper and bigger.
I may be completely wrong here, but I think if DRM enabled equipement becomes too ubiquitus (I am not talking only HDTV here) analog methods of aquiring the information could become rather usefull. The information could then be stored in non-DRM formats. How big would be the loss if I capture a song from a decent sound card using the built-in A-D converter? And if the degradation using a sound card is not acceptable, there must be better equipement available for a reasonal price.
And let's not forget people who've modded their User-Agent to display IE so they can actually (gasp) visit websites.
Even now there's inspid sites out there which refuse to display content if the user-agent isn't MSIE on Windows. Change the user-agent, and golly, look, they display just fine - but the owner doesn't want to test under any browser except IE, so they lock everyone else out.
I think this will resolve itself. While it is yet another kick to the nuts of the common aging consumer, I don't think the demand is there anymore.
I fall into the 18 to 36 age group, and at the current rate of folks not watching TV- There will be nobody left to care about it in 15 years. Most of this age group- which consititutes the future and present of the US Male population- don't watch TV anymore.
It's all internet or work driven for them. TV has become irrelevant. You can download a movie not even in the Theatre's yet in under an hour, and project it on a 20X30 wall in the comfort of your own home.
This isn't the future. This is now. People are building these into their houses before anything else. No commercials. No waiting. No concession. Complete liberty to watch what you want when you want. That's the demographic HDTV and the broadcast DRM flag are up against. It's already too late for the industry. They missed it. The golden rule of technology is- the more you squeeze, the more you lose. In this case, they are squeezing the elderly only. And that time is finite.
I agree that the public and after that Congrees will start caring...
... so be sure to vote!
When the average Joe cannot do what he wants to do, such as record and watch any TV show, then Congress will get enough feedback from the voters and will throw out a rule the FCC has no right to make in the first place. Since when does the communication act give the FCC the power to enforce DRM regulations? I suspect the courts and/or congress will have to trim their overzealous nails on this. When the FDA tried to regulate and outlaw certain vitamins and herbal preparations about 10 years ago, Congress was deluged with letters and phone calls like never before, and thereupon basically told the FDA they had no jusrisdiction in that area. So today you can still buy 1000mg vitamin C capspules and many other herbs and vitamins which the medical/pharmaceutical lobby wanted to legislate out of existence. Similarly, one of these days, the RIAA/MPAA will overstep their bounds and no amount of money will assuage the wrath of the voters until Congress listens to the voters rather than the money. In the end is still about votes
Meanwhile, I believe equipment manufacturers can safely ignore the invalid FCC rule concerning any mandatory DRM deadline, since the courts and congress will likely do the same thing to this overzealous bureaucratic agency that they did to the FDA. I suspect that if the FCC did try to enforce their rule against a manufacturer who refused to implement the broadcast flag or any other mandatory DRM rule, the court would tell them that DRM legislation was the domain of Congress and the communications act does not give the FCC authority to make entirely new laws.
All theory is gray
Let the MPAA and their buddies in TV-land foist this crap onto the public; it's the sort of thing that'll piss off even Joe Consumer. And seriously, what will happen when Joe Consumer begins to get annoyed? I'd imagine that 'Internet TV shows' will start popping up as an alternative to the headaches and hassles of what modern, regular TV viewing is becoming. And 'ITV' isn't regulated in any sense of the word; ITV is just a streaming or downloadable movie or series installment, no different than any other streaming or downloadable content.
Imagine what will happen if Joe Consumer finds he can watch whatever shows he wants, whenever the hell he wants, never missing any of them, and never having to sit through a single ad. If you're thinking "it'll never happen" because it's on a computer and not on those nifty big-screen TVs, do try to remember that starting with the year 2000 TV viewership fell by nearly 3% in the United States, the first decline in the history of TV. Not only that but viewership has continued to decline with each successive year, much to the consternation of the conglomerates. What are those people doing instead of watching TV? *They're on the internet*. Add what makes TV attractive to the other forms of amusement the internet provides and watch the conglomerates really start to shit a brick....
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
most cable boxes with firewire ports don't actually have the firewire ports enabled.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
We were SUPPOSED to be able to buy HDTV tuners in 1997!! And they were supposed to be $50 by now. I'm sure it's entirely possible to make one at that price point...it's not much different processing wise than a DVD player. Everyone in the Biz is dragging their feet to make "monopoly money" from the change over. You'll note that while the FCC mandated the "V-chip" they HAVEN'T mandated HDTV tuners in all new TVs with the change over deadlines already past several times over!!!
Personally though, I saw some nice smaller [30"] HDTVs [16:9, i1080 & all] lately that are just about reasonable under $1ooo...even nearing the $500 price point which will offically push them into the mainstream. Of course they're all new models...being as all the manufactures are in the pockets of the *IAA i'm sure they're "safe" now.