Sage, allvid and the FCC

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by brainbone

Cinavia is only on the audio track and, so far, seems to be holding up pretty well. Watermarking only the audio track would take much less resource than re-encoding the video track.

So a proprietary algorithm that's relatively new and isn't widely used hasn't been broken yet. That's not surprising, particularly when the DMCA makes it difficult for the academic community to study it.

Cinavia is really causing anyone problems yet. Most players don't have Cinavia detectors, and even those that do seem to only look for the watermark in discs, so ripped movies will play fine if they're streamed.

There's really no question about whether or not you can remove digital watermarks. You always can, the question is how much damage do you have to do to the audio/video to get rid of it. Probably largely because of the proprietary nature of Cinavia, there doesn't seem to be any studies on its effectiveness. Like cryptography, watermarking is going to be awfully hard to get right. Doing it in a closed environment isn't likely to produce great results.

[panteragstk]

Originally Posted by reggie14

I think cable/satellite TV in general is far closer to a renting model than a buying model. You don't honestly think you're buying nearly unlimited rights to everything that's airing on TV for $50 a month, do you?

This is a good point. I've never actually thought of it this way before. It makes the provider's point of their content being stolen more relevant. I just don't get what they are actually afraid of. Do they really think anyone not using an "approved" DVR will distribute the content? Just because we use a computer to manage all of our recordings doesn't make us pirates. It does make it easier, but the people who put the pirated content on the net are going to do it no matter what the FCC or anyone else says or does. All DRM ends up doing is making consumer have more difficulty than necessary when trying to use or own media be it blu-ray or TV. It's a sad day when recording TV so we can watch it on a device of our choosing merits this much discussion.

I never had any problems with DRM until I bought a blu-ray drive and tried to play the 3 movies I purchased with it. I had an HDCP compliant video card and TV and I got an HDCP error the first time, and an error stating the software I was using wasn't compatible with the blu-ray (thanks powerdvd). I had to download AnyDVD-HD just to WATCH a movie I paid for. Things like that make it really hard to give my money to companies that think that is an OK way to treat consumers. The saddest part is that same thing happens to normal set top blu-ray players. What happens when your player stops getting firmware updates to make it compatible with newer blur-ray DRM schemes? It's bad business IMHO.

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by panteragstk

I just don't get what they are actually afraid of. Do they really think anyone not using an "approved" DVR will distribute the content? Just because we use a computer to manage all of our recordings doesn't make us pirates. It does make it easier, but the people who put the pirated content on the net are going to do it no matter what the FCC or anyone else says or does.

Well, keep in mind the "they" in this case is probably more the content creators, not the providers.

Rightly or wrongly, I think the TV/movie industry is worried about seeing another Napster. Bittorrent never quite lived up to that, and probably never will because I think people have warmed to the idea of paying for digital video and services like iTunes and Netflix have made it easier to buy/rent. Nonetheless, they're still concerned about it.

I do think computers are a bit of a game-changer here. Even forgetting about about the threat of piracy, there's still a big difference here. You can't enforce a renting model without DRM. That is, you can't do things like a 1 day VOD rental for $5 and a purchase for $20. I'm not quite sure what that means for cable TV. As I said, I look at that like a renting model. If they can't have some assurance that people won't hoard shows (either because of DRM, technical limitations, or difficulty), then it seems like they'll have to start charging more like purchase rather than a rental.

For content creators, I imagine the concern is a potential steep loss in revenue if it ever caught on. Right now studios can expect to get a bunch of money during a show's first run, more during syndication if the show is popular, potentially quite a bit with DVD sales, and maybe a little bit from Netflix streaming or iTunes sales. They probably basically expect that a fan would provide multiple revenue stream throughout the lifetime of the show, such as by watching it on TV and buying the DVDs.

With massive storage being pretty cheap these days, DRM-less video could effectively make everything that happens after the initial airing obsolete.

If I understand your claims, you're basically saying that just wouldn't happen. There's never going to be more than a handful of people with extravagant enough setups to really challenge the current business model. That's probably true. But I don't see why the industry would be that interested in changing their ways to make things easier for a very small number of people.

Coming back to DRM and piracy, I'm not entirely convinced strong DRM is hopeless. I just don't think you can do it entirely in software- you need some sort of trusted hardware. That seems perfectly plausible. We've been seeing a move in that direction for a while. Video cards with protected digital outputs are one example. TPMs are always described as being a few years off. And Sandy Bridge CPUs have some fairly basic DRM capabilities built in. While a TPM by itself doesn't buy you much in terms of DRM (despite what you may have heard), a TPM plus a CPU with something like Trusted Execution Technology could go a long way. You'd need to lock down the analog hole, but that's do-able.

Will we see that happen? Probably not. But I think for strong DRM to be an option in the future, they'll need to keep using it today even if it isn't entirely effective. There's probably not a great return on investment for DRM, but they probably look at it as mitigating an unlikely, but potentially catastrophic, risk to their business model. If they have reason to think the impact would be severe, that would justify taking a very risk-adverse approach.

[panteragstk]

Originally Posted by reggie14

If I understand your claims, you're basically saying that just wouldn't happen. There's never going to be more than a handful of people with extravagant enough setups to really challenge the current business model. That's probably true. But I don't see why the industry would be that interested in changing their ways to make things easier for a very small number of people.

I think that is where the problem for us really is. We are too small a group for them to justify creating a standard to make things work the way we would like them to. I really hope that something can be done to help us out with getting pay TV service into Sage, but it will take a while for us to see anything.