Digital TV foreshadows erosion of Internet rights

Tag : Cable TV Adapters


With regard to the free exchange of information over the Internet,we, the people, have mostly managed to hold our ground. We canthank activists, hacktivists, legislators saying "no, thanks" tomoney from the entertainment lobbies, and forward-thinking artistsand content distributors--I'm proud that writers and publisherstook the lead on this--who recognize that reach is the currency ofthe digital age.

We should take as a warning sign of descent down the slippery slopetoward the loss of Internet freedoms Internet providers' arbitraryblocking and throttling of BitTorrent traffic. The rationale pointsto the bandwidth wasted by BitTorrent. That doesn't ring true.There are other flavors of traffic such as VOIP, streaming news,advertising and entertainment, photo galleries, remote PC access,Usenet repositories, denial of service attacks, and spam thatconsume beastly amounts of bandwidth, but somehow none of thesewarrants detection and control at the provider's end of the pipe.It makes one wonder, what's so special about BitTorrent that itcries out to be controlled in such a radical manner?

That's an easy one. The entertainment lobby (my shorthand to avoidspewing the alphabet soup of movie, TV, and music trade groups),having failed to get the feds to impose a tax on videotapes andrecordable discs, or to hold Internet providers liable forcopyrighted content transferred through their networks, or (so far)to add a piracy tax to every broadband user's monthly bill, isusing the most powerful weapon yet devised: "Standards."

I put that in quotes to differentiate it from true standards.Analog television, for example, works because standards andregulations ensure the interoperation of transmitters andreceivers. These standards take the public good into account. Themove toward digital television, which will be complete in February2009, is attended by standards and regulations constructed toensure interoperability and to guard the public good as well. Nobroadcaster can arrange that a digital TV signal require anon-standard receiver, for example, one that bills your credit cardevery time you watch a popular show on an over-the-air (OTA)digital channel. As a matter of practice, most cable companies passlocal broadcasters' HD channels to their basic cable subscribers.

The very characteristic that makes digital TV look so good is theone that makes it so vulnerable to restriction and manipulation: ATV broadcast is no longer a signal, it's a bitstream, one that hasfar fewer points of origination than the Internet and is thereforeeasier to control. Digital TV is rapidly heading for precisely thesort of lockdown that entertainment and broadcast lobbies desirefor the Internet, and to the extent that they can be used as videoplayers and recorders, our PCs, Macs, and notebooks.

The primary example of digital lockdown is HDMI, the HighDefinition Multimedia Interface. Simply put, HDMI is how you getdigital video into a high-definition TV. HDMI looks like a dreamcome true: A single cable with a small connector passes digitalvideo, digital audio, and control signals. HDMI has alwaysincorporated High Definition Copy Protection (HDCP), but for a longtime its enforcement was relaxed. You could hook an LCD computermonitor to a cable box or DVD player with an HDMI output. All youneeded was a $20 HDMI/DVI adapter.

It doesn't work that way now. If you plug an LCD monitor into alate model DVD player or other device with an HDMI output, allyou'll see is text telling you that your device is incompatible. Ifit were truly incompatible, it wouldn't be able to display thattext. Wait, it gets better.

Let's say you do spring for an HDTV with HDMI input. Depending onthe maker of your cable box or DVD player, if you plug an HDMIcable into your TV, the device turns off all of its analog outputs.Simply put, the price for upgrading your TV to digital is that yourexisting VCR, DVD recorder, and video-capable PC or Mac go blind. Ican make recordings of digital and analog cable programs, but onlyif I go behind my equipment rack and yank the HDMI cable out of myset top box. It gets better still.

HDCP requires credential handshaking that's prone to errors,forcing many consumers into the ludicrous practice of rebootingtheir TVs (mine runs Linux) to recover permission to watch them.I've had to update the firmware on my TV and amplifier to addressHDCP issues, and it's still buggy as hell.

The lesson I learned from this is not to waste my money on HDMIcables. By trying to sneak martial law into a digital videointerconnect standard, entertainment forced consumers to retreat toreadily recordable analog even for their high definition content.Fortunately, the quality of component video, the three-cable analogconnection supported by all HDTVs and high-definition devices, isindistinguishable from HDMI in well-made equipment.

Can't a computer with a digital TV tuner and a DVD drive solve thiswhole mess and allow all-digital connections? It ought to. A copyof Vista Ultimate and a $129 TV tuner are ostensibly all that'srequired to turn a PC into a combination digital cable box andvideo recorder. But not so fast, friend. Have you met the broadcastflag?

The broadcast flag signals receiving equipment that recording isnot allowed, not even to videotape. A broadcaster can stream thisflag into any program it chooses. Nothing can be sold in the U.S.that doesn't respect the broadcast flag and pass it downstream.Yes, I am aware that the FCC's mandate for the broadcast flag wasoverturned by a Court of Appeals. This simply means it doesn't havefederal enforcement. The entertainment lobby still has the power toimpose its will on technology companies. Some companies proved moreeager to eat from entertainment's hand than others.

Microsoft baked the broadcast flag into Vista, a fact that wasrevealed last month when NBC inadvertently flipped on the flag foran episode of American Gladiator. Vista-based Windows Media Centersystems tuned to NBC refused to record the show. I'd take a cheapshot about this program's popularity among Vista users, but Vistausers weren't alone. Everybody loving their new digital videorecorders got hit by the blackout. NBC said "oops" and Microsoftsaid "so what?" Let's start a pool on how long it will take beforewe're paying for reruns of the network TV shows we pick up withrabbit ears or pull from basic cable.

It disappoints me deeply that not one vendor told entertainment toget stuffed. The closest thing I've gotten to a statement from avendor that's been in the back room with entertainment came fromATI, fresh from its AMD buyout and jazzed about a recent win."We're one of the first to ship Blu-Ray player software with ourhardware." Later in the discussion, I was told that "ATI hasreduced the risk of unauthorized access to the frame buffer." Giventhat frame buffer access enables recording video to disk, I didn'thave to ask who was considered unauthorized.

It would seem that the Internet, being so anarchistic, won't haveits arm twisted so readily by the entertainment lobby, but Internetrights restrictions come through your telecommunications equipment.It would take an act of Congress to force a change to firmware ofnetworking devices to restrict traffic based on content. There willbe no broadcast flag for files that don't start life as commercialcontent. The vendors who make the components and operating systemsthat run our laptops and desktops see broadband digitalentertainment as the next frontier, the next great driver of salesand services. The entertainment industry declared that there is nopath to riches but through them, and that path requires paving overa few of your freedoms.

Unless, that is, you download your entertainment throughBitTorrent. Does it meet the definition of "irony" that it's fareasier for an unskilled person to do this than to deal with HDMI,HDCP, broadcast flags, frame buffer blocks, and other nonsensecreated specifically to frustrate consumers' efforts to enjoydigital entertainment?