In this series of articles on “digital convergence” – the idea of integrating the digital video and audio capabilities of the computer, the internet, and the home entertainment center – we’ve focused so far on digital music. Digital music stores are popping up like Spring lilies, and portable digital music players are flying off the shelves. Apple alone sold around 810,000 iPods in the January through March quarter. Do the math, and that’s over six iPods per minute. This summer, players will be introduced that can carry music, video, movies and photos. Make no mistake about it – digital movies and video will be touted as “the next big thing”.

The TV and movie industries are well aware that the promise of high speed internet connections streaming their products to consumers brings with it the promise of increased “sharing” of their products. Seeing how this “sharing” has affected the music industry (i.e., reducing profits), the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and other industry organizations have taken a proactive approach to protecting their interests. What’s at stake? Huge bucks, of course.

You’ll remember from our earlier history discussions that the DVD has pretty much supplanted the VHS tape as the digital video format of choice. This last holiday season DVD players were selling for $39, and the home DVD recorder is on its way to pushing the family VCR into the garage sale pile. How can the TV/movie industry protect their interests in all that digital data?

Realizing the popularity of the DVD format, the major studios got together and developed an encryption scheme that would prevent a DVD copied onto a hard drive, or burned onto a recordable DVD, from ever being played. Shortly thereafter, of course, the encryption scheme was cracked. Today you can download any of a number of software applications that will copy the DVD onto your computer, decrypt it, and burn it onto another DVD. You can also compress the resulting digital video. Compressing it cuts down on the space you need to store it, and allows burning it onto a CD. Although these Video CDs (VCDs) don’t have the video or audio quality of true DVDs, the CD media they’re burned on is far less expensive than blank DVD media, and most VCDs can be played on home or computer DVD players. Compressed video is also much easier to transmit over the broadband internet. The same peer-to-peer file sharing systems that have given the music industry fits are offering an ever-increasing selection of compressed video – from first-run movies, to the latest indiscretions of the stupidly wealthy, to entire seasons of TV shows.

Within a short time, all of the TV signals moving over the airwaves will be digital. There’s digital cable, digital satellite, and the coming broadband internet services like MSN Premium. As you probably have surmised, “unprotected” digital content moving unrestricted over the various “channels” is the MPAA and TV industry’s “nightmare scenario”. Rather than raise the white flag, the industries have come up with the “Advanced Television Committee Flag”. We’ll call it the “broadcast flag”.

The broadcast flag went into the Federal Communication Commission’s (FCC) rulebook in November of 2003. Simplistically, here’s the idea. Every digitally broadcast movie and TV show will carry inside it a bit of code - a flag, if you will. Every TV sold in the United States, starting in July of 2005, will search any incoming signal for this flag. If the flag is present, the TV will …

Oh, we’re out of space. Nothing like a good cliffhanger, I always say. See you next week.

© 2004 Peter F. Zimowski