• by July 29, 2004

RAISING THE BROADCAST FLAG AND PUTTING DVRs AT HALF-MAST -- Just when the Riff was getting cocky and self-righteous over the new-found control we've gotten over the TV medium, the folks at Wired News have come along to burst our sense of media omnipotence. According to the wired-in news sleuths, consumer supremacy over TV content will last only about another year, after which new "copy controls" that have been embedded into digital TV codes will shift control back to telecasters, and presumably, to the folks who place the ads that underwrite much of their programming.

While the development isn't something you see in the alarm-setting-off headlines in the consumer and trade press about how digital video recorders are destroying business models for the TV industry and Madison Avenue alike, broadcasters have steadily and quietly been shifting from analog to digital broadcasting formats, as they have been required to do by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. And for all the kvetching the TV people have been doing about the forced deadlines, the extra engineering costs, and the fact that only a handful of American households actually have digital TV sets, the move apparently has a significant upside that might help combat the disruptive nature of DVRs.

"To protect this digital content from piracy, the Federal Communications Commission adopted a rule that digital television tuners recognize copy controls, called the broadcast flag (PDF), encoded in content streams," wrote Wired News in a story posted online this week (insert link here). "Digital video-recording devices would detect the broadcast flag, and the flag would prevent users from making multiple high-quality copies of the programs for illegal distribution. As of July 1, 2005, it would be illegal to manufacture or import devices that can receive digital programming without responding to the broadcast flag."

Not surprisingly, the regulation is not without its consumer detractors, and consumer media advocacy group the Electronic Frontier Foundation has launched what it's dubbed as the Digital Television Liberation Project to educate consumers on how to make their own personal video recorders from off-the-shelf parts that can circumvent the broadcast flags altogether.

It's relatively simple, says the EFF, just go out and buy a digital TV, or a tuner card for a personal computer and download instructions from their Web site to build a custom TiVo-like DVR that'll give you all the functions of a conventional, off-the-shelf DVR, but without those pesky broadcast flag controls. Apparently, the EFF doesn't recall all those blinking "12:00" LEDs that have plagued America's VCR crowd to understand that while this may be an extremely Libertarian idea, it's not a very practical one. And as much as the Riff likes the notion of tackling this, frankly, we're still trying to make the wireless network work that we first read about in Wired News.