Note: The following posts were imported from my previous blogs.

Broadcast protection flag in HDTV  #
Thursday, 20 Feb 2003 12:57PM
Interesting if semi-pointless experiments by blogger Raffi in an attempt to proove the MPAA wrong in their quest for a broadcast protection flag in HDTV broadcasts (ie. a flag that HD equipment would use to determine if you were allowed to copy / record the show being broadcast). (via Boingboing.net)

my reply ... to the mpaa's brief ... that a broadcast protection flag is necessary for the protection of over the air HDTV signals. The MPAA has made the claim that if over the air HDTV signals are unprotected then it will be trivial to redistribute that content via...

  • electronic mail
  • "shared folders"
  • a web site
  • P2P file-sharing software

So i decided to see if it what they said was possible.

Raffi's tests included recording the show to HDTV equiv. quality onto his computer then trying to move the file (about 40+ Gigabytes) to friends via email, FTP, P2P, DVD, CDr etc.

His conclusion is of course that the file is much too big to move around easily and thus the MPAA's worry about HDTV shows being ripped and distributed in their original quality is not worth bothering with as we don't have the technology to move such huge files around these days.

One problem with the test is the size of the program Raffi used as his experiment. The full 5 hour broadcast of the Superbowl. A 50Gb five hour show might sound massive but a 5Gb half hour show (such as South Park) is starting to sound less so...

And... wouldn't we have been saying the same thing in 1990 about MP3 music files? My computer had a 10Mb hard drive. The biggest cheap portable media available was the 720kbyte 5.25" floppy disc. A five hour MP3 would be around 400 Meg. Even a half hour mp3 would be around 40 Meg. Much too big to think about with my 1990 computer. 40Mb these days is nothing. Barely noticable on a 640Mb CDr.

Whose to say that in 10 years time 5 Gig won't sound pathetically small? We already have 40Gb MP3 player/portable harddrives... the typically hard drive in a computer is 80 Gig.

Sure, transferring 5 Gig on the net sounds like it would take forever but people are doing it every day now. Listen to the people in the UK complain that their cable internet account is limited to only 1 Gig a day. "One little tiny gig oh my life is ruined!". And we Aussies with out 6Gig a month plans thought we had it bad.

But of course they won't be that quality on the net, they'll be in DivX... hell even DVD quality isn't that huge. You'd typically fit a half hour episode of a show easily into 2Gb in excellent quality. People are regularly trading 450Meg VCD quality versons of TV shows right now.

What the MPAA is claiming will happen to HDTV is happening now with the use of TiVo and other personal video recorders. But they don't care about tv show trading. They just want to stop tv show recording full stop. No more time shifting. You will watch out advertising or you can't watch at all...

Although Raffi's experiements are for a worthy cause they miss the point. We shouldn't be telling the MPAA that the broadcast protection flag is pointless because the technology isn't available to do what they claim will happen (mass distribution of TV shows). We should be telling them it's wrong because it goes against the time-shifting rules of TV that have been around since the first Sony VCR. The right to record TV and watch it when we like.