Managing Rights Management

DirectTV Clamps Down

[I've been off doing a crash project for a client. Catching up today.]

Several sources including this Ars Technica article by Eric Bangeman report that Direct TV has changed the rights management rules regarding the time to view recorded TV shows.

DirecTV DVR owners got some bad news from the satellite TV provider recently when the company announced that it will break some of the existing functionality of the DVRs. Effective April 15, subscribers will only have 24 hours to watch pay-per-view movies recorded to their DVRs. Once the movies are purchased, the clock starts ticking, and after 24 hours, the PPV movie saved to your DVR will become nothing more than an unreadable collection of zeros and ones.

Why the studios should care is beyond me. Another capricious act by content owners and distributors.

Digimarc Conference Call - A Few Tidbits

A lot of the call and questions are focused on the ID part of Digimarc's business including watermarking of media content. Here are some tidbits (paraphrased):

Blu-ray win not relevant to Digimarc since Digimarc is involved in both formats other than greater sales in 08. IP connected entertainment devices will be more important. Technology for identifying media objects will become increasingly important. Final Blu-ray license will require Digimarc watermarking. Probably the middle of '09 before royalty revenue from Blu-ray sales become material to Digimarc's financial results.

Nielson relationship going great. We're in the development stage getting solutions ready for market. They will be Nielson's solutions. We're cranking full speed on it.

DRM In Movie and TV Downloads? Wired Says No Way!

Is the movie download business like the record  business and should the lessons learned there be applied to movie and TV program downloads? Yes, says Frank Rose in Wired in an argument that seems a bit illogical:

The lessons from the music fiasco are clear: Trying to limit the inherent advantages of digital files is a losing strategy. The way to stop piracy is to make everything available — easily, legally, and at a fair price. But it's a lot of work to secure Internet rights to old films and TV series from writers, directors, composers, and the like, and the studios show little inclination to monkey around with their lucrative sales to premium channels like HBO — deals that don't affect DVD sales but are written in a way that can keep electronic distribution rights locked up for years. "There would be a lot fewer Mercedes pulling up to the Palm every day without those pay-TV deals," one exec quips. Right — but how many music moguls have you seen pulling up to the Palm lately?

If the music industry failed to monetize because of rampant piracy of a product that was provided on CDs without protection, and if the movie industry more successfully monetized by locking up content for a period of time on many channels, what's wrong with copy protection and DRM?

Delaying the Canibalization of The Cable TV Business

One of the high level themes underlying today's FCC hearing on net neutrality is what's motivating Comcast to interfere with P2P traffic? Their answer is that they manage the use of a small number of users whose traffic my otherwise degrade the experience of the many more users who are not doing P2P.

Increasingly, P2P is being used to share or deliver video via the Internet. These video providers are increasingly competing with the Cable TV operators for audience, or in the vernacular, for eyeballs. This morning saw a demo and heard a presentation by Gilles BianRosa, CEO of  Vuze which uses P2P to distribute video programming across the net.

Factoid mentioned this morning: more content is downloaded from YouTube than was distributed across the Internet in 2000.

Verizon offers, for example, 20 megabits per second in each direction on its FiOS network and doesn't discriminate against P2P applications largely because of important architectual differences between FiOS and cable-based broadband networks.

So, why does Comcast interfere with P2P traffic? One possible answer is that they are trying to delay competition with its base Cable TV business.

CH-DVD, DRM, and The Blu-ray HD-DVD Battle

BetaNews has a couple of related articles of interest. Jacqueline Emigh's article begins with old news that DRM for music is dying, if not dead. More interesting is the discussing of the Chinese DVD standard, CH-DVD:

For high-def video to really start reaching greater numbers of people, high-def vendors need to give up their current grip on DRM and other manifestations of Blu-ray and HD DVD proprietary formats, and start selling discs that will work interchangeably on any vendor's HD equipment. But what will happen if these two warring camps continue to stay locked in their current stalemate?

Philips and IBM Copy Protection and Conditional Access Patents

New patents are issued Tuesdays by the USPTO. Assigned to Philips, the first of today's patents addresses the use of watermarking to carry copy protection information. Assigned to IBM, the second patent describes techniques for key distribution in a conditional access system.

Microsoft's HD / CableCard Strategy

The Floppyhead blog has an interesting post regarding Microsoft and digital cable tuners and CableCards. The studio-backed effort to lock up the HD video path from tuner to display may have interesting consequences for Microsoft, consequences not unlike Apple's use of Fairplay DRM to anchor music tracks to iTunes.

Basically, they [Microsoft] have a monoply of the digital cable tuner market (not including Tivo since it is not a PC-based solution). How many companies have the ability to deliver DVR software and convince vendors to supply their software? No matter what Microsoft does or how far they lag behind the market, you have to use Vista to watch cable premium content on your computer in HD. No competitor can match them on that important feature. All thanks to DRM. Not innovation or feature-sets, but content protection.

Watermarking and Fingerprinting Technologies Rated Highly in Digital Video Barometer Executive Survey

A Teletrax sponsored survey of media executives indicates strong interest in fingerprinting and watermarking tools and services. The press release also notes that:

Respondents were generally bullish on the growth of Internet video content and the shift in consumption of video content from TV to the Internet. Eighty percent of the executives polled said that at least 40 percent, if not a greater proportion, of video content will be consumed on the Internet (versus television) in 2012. However, only 26 percent of respondents said that video content will be distributed freely, without content owners mandating royalties paid, by 2012.

Wesley Crusher Crushed By DirecTV HDMI Problem - Not

The blogosphere (e.g., Wired, P2PNet, and various comments appended thereto) was beginning to trash DirecTV and copy protection for HDTV signals. This following a post on Wil Wheaton's  blog indicating that his HDTV failed to work when connected to DirecTV through a HDMI interface. Instead of crystal clear TV, he got a nasty message on all channels saying:

This program includes content protection restricts viewing on the television attached to your DIRECTV receiver's HDMI connector.

Following a suggestion from one commentator to unplug all the devices and reconnect and restart everything, the problem disappeared and Wheaton was able to enjoy his favorite programs.

Software-based DRM solutions go invisible to Frustrate Pirates

So says Amber Chen of APBNews.

But, what is noteworthy in the context of asset protection is its DRM software, which gives content owners and service providers the flexibility to choose the level of security and access. An open architecture allows this safeguard to be used with a range of standard server hardware, set-top boxes (STBs) and silicon chips.

“Our IPTV content-protection implementation is designed to work well on any OS (operating system),” says Brady. The platform uses encryption algorithms such as RSA (named after inventors Rivest, Shamir and Adleman), PKI (public key infrastructure) and AES (advanced encryption standard) that is not dependent on the OS, he explains. The DRM solution includes hardware-backed authentication and copy prevention to stop material from leaving the viewer’s screen unlawfully.

BBC's iPlayer Beta Live Tomorrow

The BBC is set to launch  it's Internet TV service using Microsoft's DRM. According to the Telegraph, the player will be available tomorrow here. The beta version is supported only for Windows XP and not Vista (yet).

Controls on downloaded programs include not being able to forward or share.

The BBC iPlayer enters public beta tomorrow, and will allow licence holders to download most BBC programmes, and keep them on a computer for up to 30 days.

However, once you start watching them, you only have a seven-day period to view them, as many times as you like.

 

CableBox liberation and DRM

The long delayed requirement to allow consumers to purchase cable boxes will soon be upon us. Mark Fleichman has a useful posting on DigitalTrends.com regarding the July1 CableCARD requirements that also addresses DRM issues.

HBO's Zitter Says DRM A Misnomer

Broadcasting & Cable has an article reporting that HBO CTO Bob Zitter says DRM is a misnomer that "emphasized restrictions instead of opportunities." The opportunities are for services like HD TV on demand and cable-to-optical. Snippets:

But the fact that current high-definition set-tops still output unencrypted analog video through their component video outputs—a problem known as the "analog hole"---makes it too much of a piracy risk to widely offer high-definition HBO content on-demand today.

Newer HD set-tops that have a digital output with digital copy protection, such as DVI or HDMI, could allow HBO viewers to enjoy HD content on-demand while protecting HBO's economic interest. But most viewers with such set-tops are still using their analog outputs and component video cables, which cost less than HDMI cables, to connect them to their HD sets.

Theoretically, says Zitter, those analog outputs could be disabled, forcing consumers to use a secure digital connection to watch HD content. But current FCC rules don't give HBO or cable operators that power, in order to protect consumers who bought early HDTV sets that don't support digital copy protection.

"They say we can't turn off the analog output," Zitter notes.

IPTV - Is Security Holding Back Deployment

Having solved DRM issues, the lack of security has been holding back deployment of IPTV, this according to Tim Wilson, site editor for Dark Reading:

Cablevision's Net-based DVR Services

Newfactor reports that Cablevision is testing a net-based DVR service that will eventually enable consumers to store up to 80 Gigs or about 45 hours of video on Cablevision servers. Snippets:

While TV networks and other content providers have raised concerns about digital rights and the ability of consumers to bypass advertisements using DVR technology, Cablevision contends that the new service abides by copyright laws.

Consumers have well-established rights to "time shift" television programming by making copies for personal, in-home viewing, the company said in a statement.

Gates, BBC On DRM, TV

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and Ashley Highfield, the BBC's director of new media and technology did a Q/A at the Mix06 Conference in Las Vegas, this according to an article published on Informitv.com. Topics included DRM. Snippets:

How IPTV May Change The Role Of Telecom Infrastructure

This longish article in Billing World addresses how telecom (broadly construed) back office infrastructures are evolving to address the delivery of video programming over the Internet (IPTV) and over cellular networks. There are lots of 3- and 4-letter acronyms and vendor names, but  the main points include that back office functions are evolving to meet the demands of new content delivery technologies. Snippets:

The Broadcast Flag Rises From The Ashes - Maybe

[tip 'o the hat to Dave Farber's IP list.] In an attempt to protect high definition video content, major content companies have been lobbying for some time to include a "broadcast flag" in the video stream indicating that the stream was protected content [The full standards document is here-big PDF technical document]. At the other end, TVs sold in the US were supposed to recognize the flag and act accordingly.  The broadcast flag was mandated by the FCC until struck down by the courts. See Declan McCullagh's Politech blogicle for pointers to the appeals court decision and related news.

Now in a recently published paper  and open letter, the Center for Democracy and Technology has addressed its concerns regarding how any future broadcast flag should and should not be implemented. Rather than opposing the flag outright, CDT is trying to provide practical advice to Congress.  Snippets from their open letter:

Are MSFT and INTL Greedy?

Writing on HardwareAnalysis.com, Sander Sassen asserts that Microsoft and Intel are acting out of greed in their efforts to secure high definition video and other media content. Greed or smart business? I think the latter.

There is, by the way, nothing inherent in well-implemented rights management that prevents the rules associated with protected content to take into account many if not most "fair use" situations. The question is whether DRM technologies included in and/or layered on top of WinTel's DRM are sufficiently feature rich to enable those with rights in media content to define apparent fair uses, such as backup copies.

Snippets:

Convergence Redux

BusinessWeek Online has an interesting interview with Linksys [acquired by Cisco] co-founder Victor Tsao regarding networked home entertainment. Cisco also acquired networked DVD player company KiSS. Snippets:

Microsoft Buffeted By Criticism Over Vista DRM

This TechWeb / Yahoo article summarizes recent responses to various DRM components of Microsoft's Vista (nee Longhorn) OS.  Snippets:

Media DRM - The Frankston View

Bob Frankston's [co-creator of spreadsheets] recent posting on DRM as an inhibitor to technology evolution is worth a read. A few reads actually. Frankston's piece illustrates what happens when competing values collide, namely consumer flexibility and technology innovation on the one hand and desire of content creators and owners to protect their rights in their works. 

The world is not binary: either/or, good/evil, protected/unprotected. The difficult judgment concerns reasonable trade-offs.

Snippets from the Frankston piece:

DRM In Hardware

Tom's Hardware site has a useful article by Wolfgang Gruener on the need for consumers to understand DRM. The context is a discussion with graphic chip company ATI. Snippets:

Comcast Joins Coral

The Register (UK) has a useful  article on Comcast joining the Coral DRM standards group. Snippets:

Digital TV

Newsweek International has a good article on digital TV including the potential for rampant piracy and DRM. The article also addresses evolving consumer habits and new media technologies. Snippets:

Microsoft and Media

Check out David Berlind's excellent  blogicle on Microsoft, rich media, and DRM. Although anything is possible, one cannot underestimate the importance of building a powerful business ecosystem, which is exactly what Berlind says MSFT is doing.  Snippet:

Intel's Home Entertainment Platform

In an interview given to the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) and described here (no subscription required), Intel's new CEO Paul Otellini says that:

BBC: iTunes for the Broadcast Industry

Several media sources, including this article published by eCommerce Times, are reporting that the BBC will trial a TV program download service starting in September. Snippets:

Next Via The Internet: Tailored TV To Suit Every Taste

Remember when 500 channels of digital cable was going to be the foundation for microsegmentation, 1-to-1 marketing, audiences of 1? Similar talk regarding the Internet is getting louder. Wave3 has a good overview article here. Let the competition for eyeballs begin.

Snippets:

DRM & IPTV

IPTV refers to the distribution of television programs, movies, and other content over the Internet, that is, over networks based on the TCP/IP packet network protocol. A recent article by Mark Sullivan on the Light Reading website addresses content deals as a driver for IPTV. Snippets: