On 15-Jun-2010, at 20:58, Nick Reynolds-FM&T wrote: > With respect to you Mo presumably this person who wrote this comment on > the Media Guardian story doesn't understand it either:
those caveats, which make quite a significant difference: > "nwhitfield > 14 Jun 2010, 7:04PM > My understanding is that most (if not all) of the equipment already on > sale includes the necessary stuff to work with this, so isn't going to > be affected - essentially the kit can understand an EPG whether it's > broadcast using the Huffman codes or not. Now they will be using them, > but end users aren't going to see any difference in that regard. Freeview HD receivers on sale today will be unaffected, though they may well need a firmware upgrade. that rather depends on whether the BBC has *already* distributed the decoding table to manufacturers, which would be quite naughty of them. > It's also clearly stated in the various documents relating to this that > it's not going to affect - at all - the ability of people to record what > they want to, on recorders with built in tuners (ie FreeviewHD+ boxes). it would be quite insane for anybody to propose otherwise, if you think about it. > In fact, the guidelines say the 'copy never' signal should not be used, > everything should be at least 'copy once' and if it's already been > broadcaster somewhere (like the US) in HD without protection, then even > 'copy once' shouldn't be used in the UK. the fourth word of that paragraph is quite important. > Realistically, this change isn't going to affect many people at all. that depends on quite a few factors. longer-term, it will (although perhaps unknowingly) affect increasing numbers of people. unfortunately, they won’t know what they’ve been missing. > How many people out there have actually taken their DVD recorder and > made multiple copies of a programme they've recorded? DVD whatnow? who cares about DVD recorders, really? these things have hard disks, network and USB ports. > Yes, some open source software may be affected, but even that's not a > certainty; MythTV copes just fine with Freesat, which uses the same > technology. Other open source systems manage well with the odd dash of > proprietary stuff in there, like the drivers for some graphics cards." MythTV copes with Freesat because it previously reverse-engineered _this_ scheme. the BBC has explicitly threatened legal action against people who do this, although whether they follow through on it is anybody’s guess. either way, however, the protection measure has been broken before it was even submitted for regulatory approval. this means, for the stated aim of preventing the pirates from uploading content to the Internet, it’s completely worthless. the above talks solely about the direct effect upon consumers in the short term based on the equipment which exists today and assuming they don’t want to do any of the things which the scheme prohibits _and_ have up-to-date equipment supporting the various schemes which make it work. anybody who’s paying any attention at all to “next-generation” TV stuff knows that “next-generation” isn’t very far away *at all*. it also doesn’t account for changing trends in consumer behaviour, nor does it account for the innovations which will be made harder [that is, more costly, or not possible] because of the licensing regime. and so, we’re left with a system which “do something which didn't achieve the desired effect, and caused additional negative effects”. this somewhat contradicts your equivalent: > do something which does achieve the desired effect and has a very small > negative impact on a very small group of people if indeed it has any negative > effect at all …which is patently false. people complained vocally about this when it was rolled out on Freesat. people had problems with equipment not working (not the receivers themselves so much, but other parts of the puzzle). how can you *possibly* think it will go any better for a significantly larger roll-out? remind me who it is that has to do with the front-line support for all of this? I don’t envy that job one little bit. so, just explain to me, in the face of all of this, how is “because the rights-holder demanded it and threatened to pull their content, despite evidence showing that on the balance of probabilities, this is unlikely” as what amounts to the *sole* justification for doing it absolutely fine all the way up the chain? my earlier (undirected) question about baseball caps was serious, incidentally, even if the choice of demand was deliberately flippant (it’s no *less* flippant than this one is, though — and indeed, would have even less risk of negative effects). would you be in favour, or not? - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
