IP: more on Piracy concerns may make older digital TV sets obsolete

[Dave Farber <dave@farber.net>]

From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne@warpspeed.com>


[Note:  This comment comes from reader Steve Schear.  DLH]

At 17:20 -0700 4/21/02, Steve Schear wrote:
>Cc: "Dewayne-Net Technology List" <dewayne-net@warpspeed.com>
>From: Steve Schear <schear@lvcm.com>
>To: "Chmielewski, Dawn" <DChmielewski@sjmercury.com>
>Subject: RE: Piracy concerns may make older digital TV sets obsolete
>Date: Sun, 21 Apr 2002 17:20:47 -0700
>
>Dawn,
>
>I think your article too readily accepts the Hollywood party line
>that the studios will be successful in thwarting consumers from
>copying HDTV broadcasts through legislation and pressure on major PC
>and consumer electronics manufacturers, and that no viable consumer
>alternative will develop
>
>First, I think its instructive to review what's happening now.
>Large numbers of digital video aficionados are already swapping
>movies on-line.  These include not only the the lower quality, often
>computer playable only, first-run movie fare more common on popular
>P2P services, but also the SuperVHS+ quality SVCD format compatible
>with many/most consumer DVD players.  If first-run, these higher
>quality movies are either clandestinely ripped from studio and
>distribution digital sources or from "screener" DVDs sent to
>industry insiders for review or award show voting.  They are most
>often traded on Usenet bulletin boards (e.g., alt.binaries.vcd)
>rather than P2P services or ICQ.  Consumers with broadband links can
>download them at megabit rates from their ISP's "local" Usenet
>servers, as opposed to downloading them over the Internet at a
>fraction of the speed from the hard disks of other users.
>
>If traders wanted they could now swap movies at DVD resolution, but
>upstream bandwidth limits on consumer broadband links make this
>impractical for most posters.  Also, DVD burners and media are still
>pricey vs. CD, so the costs still outweigh the benefits to most.
>Even with Microsoft's recent endorsement of the DVD+RW standard,
>more consumer PCs being shipped with DVD burners, and the price of
>DVD-Rs falling, its unlikely that DVD quality movies will be
>commonly swapped on-line until consumer upstream bandwidth
>increases.  The more so with many cable ISPs are instituting tiered
>pricing and bandwidth restrictions to curb what they see as a few
>"bandwidth hogs".  These price policies are more likely than legal
>threats and technology changes to consumer products to throttle
>on-line movie sharing in the short term.
>
>Second, in order to view a broadcast the information has to
>eventually be converted to an analog form compatible with our
>nervous systems.  At that point is it relatively simple technically
>to resample the image, with minimum degradation, and copy it to a
>digital medium.  Inexpensive chips are now available from which
>professionals and even advanced hobbyists can build HDTV "screen
>scrappers" boards which can be clipped onto their HDTV circuitry to
>capture movies to their PCs.  In the same way cable descrambler and
>MacroVision defeating boxes are openly sold as legit image
>stabilizers, these scrappers can be presented as bona fide signal
>processing test instruments.
>
>Although not particularly practical for consumer archiving, a one
>hour HDTV broadcast will fit nicely on a single 40 GB hard drive in
>MPEG-2 compressed format.  The broadcast industry and consumer
>electronic companies are currently working to approve a next
>generation DVD called DVD-blue (the designation refers to the
>required higher frequency, blue, laser) to pack up to 30 GB of data
>on a single disk side, in order to record HDTV-quality movies.  If
>and when recordable versions become available to consumers this
>could provide a cost effective means to archive HDTV movies.
>
>All these machinations by Hollywood are only forestalling the
>inevitable.  The recording industries owe their very existence to
>Thomas Edison, et al turn of the century inventors.  What one
>technology can bestow another can even more quickly take away.
>Stock option rich studio execs may not want to face the inevitable
>but up-and-comers in Tinsel Town may wish to ponder deeply the place
>in the creation of music and movies once their distribution monopoly
>is no more.
>
>steve

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