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Technology Events
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Wave the Broadcast Flag This article is an excerpt from the Gilder Friday Letter on October 24th, 2003. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is expected to enable “broadcast flags” in digital television (DTV) broadcasts. The broadcast flag will prevent future, compliant equipment from distributing the high-quality content over the Internet. The entertainment industry has pushed for this petty security feature for years and the FCC should approve it and move on to more important things. The DTV movement has been stuck in a quagmire for five years and the broadcast flag could be granted as a sign of surrender. The Advanced Television Systems Committee agreed on the format of DTV broadcasts in 1998, yet fewer than one million people watch DTV, which carries high definition television (HDTV). DTV is the transmission of digital television signals over-the-air and is technically known as digital terrestrial television. DTV is usually broadcast from the same TV towers as old school, analog, color TV, but DTV broadcasts are digital streams of 19 megabits-per-second (Mbps). This digital stream can carry multiple kinds of information including one HDTV signal, several standard definition television (SDTV) channels, or a few enhanced definition television (EDTV) programs. The broadcast flag is the last piece of the DTV puzzle. While over 1,000 television stations broadcasting unprotected DTV in the U.S., less than one percent of Americans have a tuner to decode the broadcasts. While over 6 million Americans have purchased HD ready sets, only 700,000 have bought a DTV tuner that could be ruled obsolete by the broadcast flag. Viewers have not jumped in because they feared buying a product that would become obsolete. The FCC has mandated that all televisions over 13” include a DTV tuner after 2007. This FCC regulation will lead most television manufacturers to become display manufacturers that sell monitors without an analog or digital tuner. Detaching the intelligence (tuner) from the display will feed the growth rate for external devices that include a DTV tuner. The FCC regulations have pushed television manufacturers into a corner where they will not support DTV. The broadcast flag could be the cornerstone that the television industry can build upon. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) will force DTV tuners to incorporate technology to protect the high quality digital broadcasts. The flag is a rather simple protection that would need to be incorporated into televisions that include DTV tuners. This rule would not apply to digital cable set-top boxes or satellite set-top boxes found in over 40 million homes today, because these devices do not decode DTV. The FCC mandate does not affect most devices and will only affect DTV tuners. The broadcast flag is acceptable curb-high security. It will keep the majority of people and businesses on the righteous path to high-quality digital entertainment. It will not stop pirates from recording shows with HDTV cameras or cracking software that bypasses the broadcast flag. The flag is the appropriate term for this technology because it is a symbol of security that everyone agrees to. If we want high-quality movies and television, a symbol of security should be granted to the producers of that content. Once the broadcast flag is used, Hollywood has signed up to distribute their treasures in HDTV. In five years, the broadcast flag will be seen as an insignificant hurdle on the road to pervasive digital content. The flag is an insignificant bit of a minor player in the broadband spectrum of entertainment. Ninety-one percent of Americans subscribe to pay television services and rarely watch over-the-air broadcasts. Instead of getting a few over-the-air stations, most people receive tens or hundreds of stations through a video service provider. The future of home entertainment is evolving quickly into a digital whirlwind of content where DTV is like a little breeze. The home of the future will receive content from a variety of sources
that are more adept at delivering content. DTV broadcasts are an inefficient
method of delivering content because better compression technologies
exist than MPEG-2. MPEG-4 is the latest compression technology that delivers
over twice as much content in the same amount of bandwidth. Before 2
million people buy DTV tuners, MPEG-4 satellites will be broadcasting
tens of channels of HDTV to the entire United States in 2004. The broadcast flag is the last gasp of a dying mode of communication.
The 5 or 10 stations of DTV in the largest urban areas are irrelevant
when compared to hundreds of channels that a satellite dish can scoop
from the air. The connection of the Internet to the television will usher
in a realm of uncensored possibilities that has never been seen in the
history of human kind. Other broadband networks will evolutionize the
television industry, and the over-the-air broadcasts will continue to
be pushed into obscurity. TV |
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