Analog switchoff == DRM screwjob
Fred sez, "Nice article explaining how the end of analog TV in the U.S. in Feb. 2009 is going to unleash DRM troubles on a lot of unsuspecting consumers."
This is great for the studios, but it's not how the audience thinks (or should think) of their product. Paying for some form of content should directly connect to real received value: a performance of a movie in a theater. A DVD with additional commentary and deleted scenes. And yes, convenient on-demand availability, when appropriate. But too often, the "value" is based upon an indirect conspiracy to make it difficult or impossible to use the media you've already paid for, making the end result a tax on the technological have-nots.Link (Thanks, Fred!) --
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Hard to disagree with this premise.
On the other hand, there's another way to look at this. When we moved to Vermont last year, we left the TVs behind.
What would happen if a HUGE NUMBER OF PEOPLE suddenly stopped watching the damn thing? "They" already lost an important chunk around the writer's strike.
I miss it next to never.
- Stu
I think a lot of people will be upset. If DRM critics are as smart as they think they are, they'll have an anti-DRM campaign ready to coincide with the analog blackout date. Articles on narrowly focused tech sites are fine but at this point they're really just preaching to the choir.
Pffft, what else is new? Broadcast media always trying to find a way to screw us. Has anyone else noticed the sudden ubiquity of advertisements DURING shows? And I don't mean product placement, like HOUSE drinking a Pepsi or EARL eating at KFC, I mean the various networks advertising their own shows at the bottom of the screen during the show you are watching. Sometimes it's only for a few seconds coming out of a commercial, sometimes its for the entire show (I recall some movie I was trying to watch, and I finally turned it off because there was a translucent ad for some other upcoming show taking up about 1/8th of the screen). How soon before the "newscrawl" we see on cable news shows gets used for advertisements during the featured program?
ILL LICH: I know exactly what you mean. When I was watching an episode of Heroes (on it's premier night) they had the bottom covered by ads for the entire show. So much so that they were actually covering subtitles in the show. I turned it off and downloaded a torrent of the show that was ripped right off the satellite sans advertisments.
I really wonder what kind of lawsuit would result if I was caught downloading shows that I pay cable for like this, especially if they're covering up subtitles and ruining the show.
I did cancel my cable ($97 for 18 HD channels, boo) a few months ago, and now the TV only gets used when I want to watch a movie. I haven't missed TV one bit. I probably will when the fall comes around though, heh.
"They" already lost an important chunk around the writer's strike.
Sadly, that's incorrect. The networks posted larger than usual profits during the writers' strike. They just ran reality shows and didn't have to pay anyone to write them. Television is an addiction. If they ran the same episode of Laverne and Shirley over and over on all channels, they'd still get an audience.
This is SOP for an industry that offers products that have no real, lasting, tangible or intrinsic value. That's one reason why I still prefer paper-based books over e-books.
No book I've ever bought has ever snapped it's cover closed and said I can't read it here or there, or after a certain arbitrary period of time has elapsed.
If they're so worried about people stealing content, then why don't they make something worth stealing.
My prediction: the analog shut-off / digital conversion will be the death knell of television. The broadcast model will go first, followed by cable and sat TV.
As alluded to in the article, those with tech chops and (more importantly) financial means will finally abandon television once and for all as the inferior technological kludge that it is and opt for other means of video program delivery.
This will leave a relatively unsophisticated and uneducated audience as a user base for the broadcast product, not an attractive prospect for an advertiser, or, in the case of public broadcasting, for funders and underwriters of programs. Smart investors and philanthropists will not continue to dump money into such a business model.
An example? Look no further than AM radio... now a vast wasteland of snake-oil salesman and nutjobs pandering to the dispossessed. Not the most attractive marketplace for your product or ideas, to say the least.
Adding on hare-brained DRM schemes will only hasten the decay... they won't be able to give their product away.
Television will be a dead medium within 5 to 10 years, replaced by file-based delivery systems of individual video programs in whatever viewing format the end user desires.
It's a stupidity tax, plain and simple.
Has anyone else noticed Comcast doing something similar? They tried to move the public access channels out of the basic cable channel range and onto the digital service. They're pushing hard to move people to digital service.
Who is watching TV? My kids have pretty much stopped. Video games and the internet are more interesting, more interactive, and more important to their social sphere. I'm about ready to ditch Comcast for AT&T DSL.
Is it too much to hope that in the long term, the less the TV and movie companies can charge will result in better written stuff? Probably.
Remember, only FULL POWER stations are switching to digital next Feb. LOW POWER stations will still broadcast their analog signals, which means that for those of us dumping cable television for the 'ol rabbit-ears, can still watch stuff like The It's Alive Show and other local hosted monster-movie shows.
Also, free-to-air satellite is still an option, for those of us that (want to) speak Spanish or Korean.
Also, #4 -- I get 19 digital channels over the air here in Pittsburgh, and I think 5 or 6 of them are HD.
"...the various networks advertising their own shows at the bottom of the screen during the show you are watching."
FWIW, those are called "snipes".
Many thanks to St. Vincent for comments received this day. I respectfully agree.
I read the article and I don't see any connection between digital broadcast television and drm. Did I miss something?
#3, Watch Idiocracy, 500 years from now all content will occupy only 20% of the screen in the center, the rest being filled with obnoxious flashing ads.
The Internet is my DVR.
The new Doctor Who? I see it anywhere from 45 minutes to 20 hours after the U.K. broadcast. Torchwood? Same deal.
Crap! I missed the Simpsons Sunday night. Oh, wait, no I didn't. I had it sans commercials WELL before midnight.
Bummer about [adult swim] losing the rights to FUTURAMA. That was part of my pre-bed ritual for years. Watch FUTURAMA, hit the sack. It's OK, though. I ripped all the DVDs to the Mac. I can watch them anytime without actually having to dig the case out from the pile, mess with the DVD player, find out I forgot to put batteries in the DVD remote (again), etc, etc, etc. When I finally get around to grabbing a used Apple TV off eBay, all my media will be on a stack of hardrives and all of it accessable via the home network.
Let me tell you, Transmission, NZB Drop, Mactheripper, Toast Titanium and the Internet are my VERY GOOD FRIENDS, indeed!
Chris Tucker: Look into a Neuros OSD. I was sad that I didn't get Team Fortress II installed quick enough to try and win one, but was happy that since I had last checked, they had dropped in price considerably.
The way it is now, the cable companies are almost giving the TV portion of their service away for free, if you get the more useful Internet and phone service along with it. The problem (for them) comes when the TV part is so devalued that people can move to competitive services for internet and phone without much sadness.
Returning to the topic of the article, I have a $40 HDTV converter debit card from the Gov't, and I'm wondering what is the most versatile and flexible piece of hardware that I should put it towards... I haven't done too much research hardware-wise, but hopefully the prices will come down a little before the card expires. There's always software-based radio, of course, but I don't have that much disposable cash and I wouldn't mind some dedicated hardware to play with. I expect it is just a basic ATSC tuner with some downconversion to NTSC. Anyone have any recommendations?
I have some people who have trouble using a TV remote, no cable or DVD added in even. They are the ones getting screwed here. They'll wake up next February and wonder where TV went. Unless we get 'em a converter for Xmas. LOL. How would you like a book that could black itself out if you weren't doing what the publisher wanted you to do with it. "You cannot read this book at Starbucks locations, they do not follow our protocol." That's why TV is in its dying years.
#7: I can see where you're going. How about IPv4 to IPv6 switch then?
What the hell are you talking about?
DTV is completely and entirely free of DRM. We defeated the broadcast flag, remember?
The analog switch-off is a change from unencrypted free-to-air analog programming to unencrypted free-to-air digital programming. There may be some problems with the transition, but they don't have a damn thing to do with DRM.
I expected better of BoingBoing than to try to tie the issue of DRM to the analog switch-off. The world has gone digital, it's about time television did too.
Is this "DRM screwjob" anticipating the rezombification of the broadcast flag for ATSC and Clear QAM once the analog hole has been eliminated?
Drew from Zhrodague has been the most on-point so far:
Free-to-air receivers and dishes used to pick up DVB-S signals such as GlobeCast for broadcasts such as al-Jazeera English pull double-duty as the source of all those DSrips (i.e. Digital Satellite) by decoding the Nagravision CAS used with Dish Network and Bell ExpressVu as long as you keep the decryption keys updated every month or two.I heard low power broadcasters complaining on NPR that they couldn't afford the $250k to upgrade to HDTV equipment... gee, this has only been 9 years and the fourth time the mandate was pushed back. Get on the trolley, already! I've only been picking up in-the-clear HDTV (approximately 30 channels) since 2005; so if you don't show up in my digital scan, I'll never see you. ADC is so last century.
DRM-free analog is going to DRM-free digital. In fact, it already has. The analog switch off won't change a thing if you are currently receiving a station's DTV broadcast now. When the switch off happens, some DTV stations might move to free up the part of the RF spectrum being released, but nothing about the DTV signal will change. Your digital TV's auto-scan will find them when they move. Even my grandmother figured it out :)
Cable is up in the air. Cable companies can choose to switch off analog in 2009, but some won't, and some will do it sooner. There are already all-digital cable markets, and whether they DRM a digital channel is up to them.
Comcast has been slowly whittling down the number of analog channels I get, but that is mostly because they can fit 8 SD/4 HD digitals in the same RF space as one crappy analog channel. When an analog channel goes to the digital tier, it almost always goes scrambled. At the same time, they have always had the OTA HD locals in clear QAM. They don't actually have to do that (FCC regs only require SD locals to be in the clear) but they do.
FYI, Hauppauge is releasing an HD capture box. It can encode 720p/1080i component video to h.264, and controls your cable box. Unlike HDMI, HD component doesn't have any kind of DRM. Should work with MythTV and other PVR software.
Comment #14 - ditto. I recently cancelled my subscription TV service and put that money into beefing up my broadband. I download just about everything I want to watch now, and it's all the fault of the networks here. If Australian TV didn't make us wait up to a year (sometimes more) for a lot of the US and UK content, started shows on time, kept advertising to within a reasonable limit, didn't "snipe" as someone up there put it, and didn't shuffle timeslots about without warning, they would not have lost me as a viewer. I'm not the only one, either - viewers are staying away in droves here, to the point where networks are only just now realising that the way to claw some of us back is to offer premium shows like Heroes, Prison Break and Supernatual within 24-48 hours of the US broadcast. Took them an extremely long time to realise just how small the world has become. And even folks who don't download are pissy enough with advertising and timeslot-shuffling to just wait until it comes out on DVD.
16: I have no sympathy for people like that. These things come with manuals for a reason.
zuzu - It was a network snafu. Not really even an accidental set of the broadcast flag, but corruption in the signal that confused some (but not all) DVRs that pay attention to DRM People were getting that on analog recordings as well, which means it was definitely not DRM. I've seen weak analog signals trigger the AACS stuff.
FWIW, my local stations find ways to mess up recordings without resorting to DRM. Dropping the signal seems to work just fine.