Is digital terrestrial TV a Trojan horse for new controls?

WIRED:The welcome arrival of a brave new technology may see it garbed in the straitjacket of recording and viewing restrictions, writes DANNY O'BRIEN

THE ROLLOUT of digital terrestrial television is slowly wending its way across the world. Most of Europe has switched, and even the United States has finally begun to turn off its old analogue TV transmitters. Even if RTÉ and OneVision has postponed this month’s launch, it’s only a matter of time before it arrives in Ireland – hopefully before the 2012 drop-dead deadline insisted by the Minister of Communications.

But will Irish digital TV arrive with an unexpected stowaway? For the last few years, in the US and Europe, the transition to digital TV has become an opportunity for broadcasters and film industry lobbyists to smuggle in new controls over how we watch TV. These rightsholder industries have wanted to use the switchover as an opportunity to add their own veto on what new technology can receive and transform TV. They want government regulators to be the enforcement wing of these new restrictions.

For those who know the history of television innovation, that seems crazy. It was the very lack of control by big media over what citizens plugged into their TV aerials that got us video-recorders, video rental stores and digital video recorders. With a pre-emptive veto, no broadcaster or movie company would have ever let those happen. In fact, the movie companies sued to have VCRs banned in the US. Yet it was those innovations that led to movie rental stores, a widening of ‘‘prime time’’ and a vibrant TV industry.

Indeed, the devices and technologies that broadcasters and movie companies want to prohibit in the digital future reads like a future wishlist for end-users, and a brilliant set of start-up ideas for entrepreneurs: technology that can skip advertisements, retransmit content to mobile phones and remote laptops, and play your recorded shows on any device you own.

Media companies do not even like what we have now. If they did get a veto, our next generation of TVs and video recorders will have fewer features than the VCR and DVRs of old. Recordings would evaporate after days and you would not be able to lend a tape to a friend. Even worse for innovation, in pursuit of that veto, rightsholders would demand that free and open-source hardware and software solutions, like the PC-based MythTV system, would be unable to connect to the public digital TV network at all.

The fight over who controls your digital video recorder began in the US, when Hollywood lobbied the United States’ Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to include a ‘‘broadcast flag’’ in US digital TV broadcasts: an encoded message which, when included in a TV transmission, would legally oblige receivers to follow certain rules. No more recording onto just any device: only government-approved technologies would be allowed.

Hollywood’s blueprint for control was thrown out by the US court system, which decided that the FCC was overstepping its authority by telling users what they could do in the privacy of their own homes. Unfortunately, in Europe, the same lobbyists successfully managed to pressure the Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) Forum, a technical group that plots Europe’s future television standards, to include similar Digital Rights Management (DRM) controls in their latest technical prescriptions. (Disclosure: my day job at the Electronic Frontier Foundation meant I fought both the ‘‘broadcast flag’’ and the DVB’s DRM proposals.)

Standards are not quite the same as the law, but they can certainly get in the way of a free and open TV system. As it turned out, most public sector broadcasters are extremely reluctant to, or legally obliged not to, get involved in limiting the use and reception of their content. Organisations like the BBC have chosen, for now, to avoid implementing the DRM touted by Hollywood.

But they remain under an incredible amount of pressure. The latest trick of lobbyists is to demand that the BBC sends digital TV in a form anyone can accept but only allow certain receivers to decode the TV guide listings that go with the pictures and sounds. Those receivers would, of course, have to follow the lobbyists’ rules. Anyone else, including independent entrepreneurs and open-source enthusiasts, would be locked out.

The BBC is currently consulting on this prospect. The strongest argument it surely has is the success of the currently open market for digital TV in the UK. Right now, the UK’s FreeView system implements absolutely none of the controls that media moguls want – and neither does the US. That means both markets are open for the widest price competition possible between the widest range of set-top boxes. Both have managed a successful digital switchover, with low prices for settop boxes and a massive uptake in the TV-watching population.

And despite the dreadful warnings of the rightsholders, neither country’s movie industries have collapsed from devastated revenues. In the US, Hollywood sternly promised to boycott all terrestrial television if they did not get their broadcast flag. They did not get their way: no boycott occurred.

I am sure that the same arguments are currently going on behind closed doors in Ireland. Because digital terrestrial television is still young here, there is no local precedent to defend an open system (apart from the fact we have had an open analogue system since the days of Logie Baird).

The rightsholders are no doubt making the same predictions of doom for a scenario where Irish digital TV is allowed to be open and Irish digital TV watchers are allowed to buy or build the technology and features they want. They will no doubt claim innovation will be chilled and film companies will boycott Ireland. The opposite is true.

Ireland should listen to its technology entrepreneurs and learn from the experience of the US and Britain – and keep its digital TV unencrypted and open for all. That will foster true innovation, commercial and open source. And if entertainment wants to start a boycott of our open-for-all TV, they can start with America and the rest of Europe first.