BBC To Kill Open Source TV?
The BBC is looking to encode TV listing metadata and employ a compression algorithm to circumvent piracy, ad removal and illegal copying. According to a recent blog post by the EFF's Danny O'Brien, the group wants to get mandatory DRM onto digital TV receivers via a broadcast flag. In other words, a "public service broadcaster" wants to lessen the way we consume media by forcing manufacturers to limit product playing abilities. While open source TV services like Boxee allow users to view programs over home networks regardless of the device, a broadcast flag would force all HDTV receivers to include content protection. For those of us who watch our programs online, this could pose a serious problem.
Says Boxee VP of Marketing Andrew Kippen, "Boxee believes there's a way to deliver entertainment in a way that is consumer-focused, while respecting the rights of content owners. We've built our company around it. People are still buying content off iTunes, and labels / artists are still making money. The way for content owners to make money is to cater to their audience, not to stifle innovation by creating a DRM racket like what's proposed here."
In 2004, the Federal Communications Commission and the Motion Picture Association of America attempted a similar enforcement regarding the US transition from analog to digital television broadcasting. However, by 2005 the broadcast flag was thrown out and regulators argued that the FCC lacked the authority to ask for HD encryption.
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They've got a lot of gall even raising the issue.
It's difficult to predict how TV is going to survive, but one thing is sure: this is not going to happen. As a fan of the national broadcast model (BBC, Canada's CBC), and someone who has been using a Mac for a TV for the last 5 years - oh, the power! - this is a joke. The BBC is one of the few broadcasters that has a secure future in this country and they want to strip the remaining value from their publicly funded product? YGBFKM!
Monopolist BBC to commit suicide. Good!
I find it ironic that the BBC have been offering a set of (Python-based) Open Source utilities and libraries for timeshifting and transcoding digital TV content for a while now, in the form of the Kamaelia project.
Still, I'd expect there to be a huge backlash if this is implemented, if only due to the fact that it'd end up rendering most deployed set-top boxes obsolete, thanks to certain manufacturers no longer supplying firmware updates...
Well, let the BBC go down that path if they like, they don't make very good documentaries anymore anyway... long live www.theopensource.tv ! :)