Pop Sci - Saving Your Set

[Katahu]

This article is in page 46 of the Popular Science magazine. The article is long, so I'll post the first 2 paragraphs.

"The Issue: Studio Execs want to control what your tv can do. Heres' he inside story on how they where stopped... this time.

M ay 6, 2005, should be a holiday. It's when a US circuit court of appeals saved your tv by stopping the broadcast flag. An inovation-killing regulation Hollywood had essentially blackmailed the FCC into enacting. In 2002, the major studio threatened to withhold shows and movies for broadcast on dtv [digital television] unless the govn't gave them control over the design of dtv devices. Then they formed the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group [BPDG] -- a cabal of tech companies, broadcasters, and Hollywood studios -- to work on the broadcast flag, a single bit that is to embedded on every dtv signal and functional like an on-off switch. Flag complient devices such as tv [television] and receivers would have to look for the flag and respond to it by limiting the output and recording abilities to those approved by Hollywood. Manufactering a device that didn't comply with the flag would be illiegal.

The studio's arguement,was that dtv was more appealing to online file sharers because o the high quality of the picture. But until average high-speed bandwith multiplies several times, anyone who wants to put a recorded tv show would have to compress the video anyways, so the quality ends up being no further than an analog recording. What's more, anyone coud still capture the dtv signal from the analog ports of a reciever and import it into their PC. The broadcast flag was a futile solution to an imaginary problem.

When my Electronic Frontier Foundation Colleages and I said as much at the BPDG meeting three years ago, they dismissed us as cranks. Andy Setos, the Fox exec who thought up the plag, told me that he just wanted to create a well-mannered marketplace."

I am NOT trying to start a flame war, just to let you know. If it gets to that, lock this post.

EDIT: The article is from the August 2005 issue.