Digital TV Foreshadows Erosion of Net Rights

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Tom Yager offers insight on how digital TV is rapidly heading toward the kind of lockdown that entertainment and broadcast lobbies desire for the Internet. Standards such as HDMI and HDCP are acting in concert to strip your equipment of its functionality, displaying 'incompatibility' messages when plugged into older HDMI-enabled devices, shutting down analog outputs when active, and requiring balky handshake credentials that force many consumers to reboot their TVs to recover permission to watch them. Even broadcast flagging, which has been overturned by the Court of Appeals, is still on the de-facto table, as the entertainment lobby retains the power to bully technology companies into baking broadcast flagging into their wares. Sure, digital TV has far fewer points of origin than the Internet and is therefore easier to control, but, as Yager writes, 'Internet rights restrictions come through your telecommunications equipment' — and it is likely through that equipment that the entertainment and broadcast lobbies will chip away at your rights on the Web."

Comments

Re:Television not behaving?

[jeiler]

I can only imagine that it has gotten worse. Anyone have some numbers? IIRC, a 30-minute broadcast typically contains 22 minutes of programming, 6 minutes of national advertising, and 2 minutes of local ads.

Re:Internet TV

[paroneayea]

Unfortunately, Apple TV is still DRM-laden, and if the internet was to go the direction that Apple TV is, it's going to become a pretty awful place to be IMO.

Fortunately there's a project that looks like it's going to become the Firefox of internet tv... and it's called Miro. It's based on simple, common and open standards... RSS, bittorrent, and just plain old DRM-free codecs. It's not pretending to be something magical, and indeed, it shouldn't.

It's already pretty enjoyable to use, but I've been doing some volunteering on the project. Trust me, the next iteration is going to be really slick.