“Meet Jas Saini. He’s chairman of the Secure Video Processor Alliance — an alliance whose members are not about to take Apple’s incursion into the home entertainment and content multiplexing market lying down,” David Berlind blogs for ZDNet.
“The battle to be your content multiplexer is on. It’s a battle that most people don’t even know is taking place. But it is. And it’s too early to declare a winner. What is a content multiplexer? It’s the device — essentially a cache — that lives at the nexus of the converging worlds of computer technology and the entertainment industry. Think of it as the train station through which all content — for example, a movie — arrives into your home and is then subsequently distributed to other consumption componentry. Apple’s iTunes software is one of the most well known examples. Via its Internet-based connection, it can take delivery of content from the iTune Music Store and distribute it to other components. In addition to being able to burn music to a CD for use on a CD player, it can also distribute content to Apple’s portable playback devices (iPods), other computers running the iTunes software, and, announced last week, to a device that lives in your home entertainment center — a device that Apple has codenamed iTV. Last week, Apple announced that movies would be available through the iTunes music store — thereby expanding the scope of content types that iTunes can aggregate and distribute,” Berlind writes.
“In hopes of giving the cable companies and PVR companies a fighting chance in the war to be the dominant content multiplexer, the Secure Video Processor Alliance (the SVP Alliance) has established a hardware-based anti-piracy standard that it says will be embedded in a great many consumer devices (PVRs, portable music and video players, big screen displays, etc.) moving forward. In a podcast interview (accessible by way of streaming or download using the embedded player at the top of this blog), Jas Saini, told me of how the technology is better than software approaches to anti-piracy (like Apple’s FairPlay) because of the way it’s embedded in the silicon from companies like Texas Instruments, ST Micro, and Broadcom (each of whom is an Alliance member).” Berlind writes.
“This along with the Alliance’s 35-member strong roster (currently excludes some big players like Microsoft, Apple, Intel, and TiVo) and yesterday’s announcements that compliant-products are soon to be delivered could turn cable TV and PVR providers into more attractive partners for content publishers like movies studios and record labels that struggle with piracy. Especially now that the software-based approaches from both Microsoft and Apple have proven fallible. Can the Alliance and its growing membership stage a come from behind win? Saini thinks so. I’m not so sure. Listen to the podcast to find out how Saini responds to a pretty tough line of questioning,” Berlind writes.
Full article and podcast here.
Related articles:
Disney’s remarkable 1st week iTunes movies sales should have studios clambering aboard Apple train – September 20, 2006
Disney sells 125,000 movie downloads via Apple’s iTunes Store in first week – September 19, 2006
Newsweek: Apple and Google talks could result in ‘iTV’ menu item for Google Video – September 17, 2006
The most exciting feature of Apple’s ‘iTV’ may be its USB port – September 15, 2006
Cringely: How Apple plans to own your living room – September 15, 2006
LA Times: With iTV+iTunes Movies, Steve Jobs stumbles over the last 100 feet – September 14, 2006
BusinessWeek: If anyone can make bridge the great divide, Apple can with ‘iTV’ – September 14, 2006
The Beeb asks: Would you buy the Apple iTV? – September 14, 2006
Three markets that are different today after Apple’s ‘It’s Showtime’ event – September 13, 2006
Cramer: Apple’s ‘iTV’ all about ease-of-use; Apple shares are going higher – September 13, 2006
Apple + Living Room = Logical Marriage + Boon for Stockholders – September 13, 2006
The Register: Apple event more like ‘No Show’ than ‘Showtime’ – September 13, 2006
The Telegraph: Steve Jobs’ genius making people desire gadgets for which they have absolutely no use – September 13, 2006
The Guardian: Steve Jobs needs ‘a charisma download, Apple risks being left behind’ – September 13, 2006
Mark Cuban: Things that are special about Apple’s announcements – September 13, 2006
Apple’s ‘iTV’ strategy – September 13, 2006
How will Apple’s ‘iTV’ work? – September 13, 2006
Apple eyes living room market with device codenamed ‘iTV’ – September 12, 2006
Analyst: Apple ‘s iTunes+iPod+iTV model ‘the gold standard for the digital home of the future’ – September 12, 2006
Analyst: Apple ‘s iTunes+iPod+iTV ‘will be hard for other players to match’ – September 12, 2006
Apple gives sneak peek of ‘iTV’ set-top box to debut Q1 2007 (with images) – September 12, 2006
Apple’s QuickTime stream of Steve Jobs special event now live – September 12, 2006
NFL and Apple team up to offer 2006 NFL game highlights via iTunes Store – September 12, 2006
Apple debuts iTunes 7 – September 12, 2006
What is the difference between hardware encryption and software encryption with regard to DRM?
They both can be circumvented. However, Software DRM can be easily modified, it is more difficult to update hardware encryption once it is broken.
Also, hardware encryption is simply software/algorthm on a chip.
I still remember the old 5.25″ floppy days where software was shipped with a laser hole physically placed on a floppy and the software checked for an unreadable sector. Even that protection scheme was broken.
Al… I remember the old 5.25 floppys also…. you could beat that protection scheme with a piece of masking tape…
Not that I ever did mind you!
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MDN word is “Data”
you’re seriously freaking me out with this MDN…. I mean it.
The wanabees strike back, with what amounts to a press release. Yawn.
Apple isn’t about to take Apple’s incursion into the living room lying down.
Guess not, since they’re part of the alliance.
Sorry, did I not see an HDMI port on the back of the iTV?
Doesn’t HDMI include HDCP?
This is just another special interest group trying to stop the general purpose computer from infringing on their market. Let’s see how long it takes before they go running to their chosen paid-for whores in Congress to whine about unfair competition.
So – this guy and a few of his buddies want to control the living room with some hardware from TI and Broadcom? Hey, my Aunt Edith wants to control the living room, too, but you don’t see her out announcing vaporware…
If you guys want to create a great user-friendly device, you don’t start by calling it “a cache that lives at the nexus of the converging worlds of computer technology and the entertainment industry”.
That’s just wrong, man.
Who are they? The Irrelevant Irrelevant Irrelevant Alliance?
The No One Knows Who You Are And No One Cares Alliance?
“Secure Video Processor Alliance not about to take Apple’s living room incursion lying down”
Maybe he shouldn’t be lying down on the job.
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i think it is funny that they are distributing their message via a podcast.
Apple may not be a member, but is a customer of Boradcom chips. A Broadcom chip powers the video capabilities of the iPod, for example.
Apple may not be a member, but is a customer of Boradcom chips. A Broadcom chip powers the video capabilities of the iPod, for example.
Hey America’s Next Top Sheep:
At first I thought it looked like Apple and Microsoft were part of the alliance, but you gotta slow down and read it again. “Excludes” Apple and Microsoft.
The whole point of the existence of these guys (SVP) is nothing more than to limit casual consumer usage of entertainment content because piracy has become the boogyman of the entertainment industry. Their paranoia equates casual sharing with piracy.
In the days of vinyl, people would loan friends LPs and singles. In the heyday of reel-to-reel tape, people recorded stuff and gave tapes to friends. When cassettes (and later CDs) became the norm, people did the same thing.
It’s a social phenomena called sharing.
It was that social sharing (not file sharing) that was at the center of the success of the original Napster. It was also at the center of record music sales at the same because this sharing (via Napster) was a better music promotional tool than “word-of-mouth” or any typical form of music promotion/advertising. It was a try-it-before-you-buy-it, “Don’t take my word for it. Listen for yourself.” form of promotion that no amount of money can buy.
Which makes me wonder if all the anti-piracy drivel over the past few years is being instigated by the advertising industry. In hindsight, I realize it was the advertising industry, not the music industry, that had the most to lose from Napster’s success.
This, more than anything else, has cemented the notion that the entertainment industries (particularly the music industry) are run by easily-influenced, short-sighted, bean-counters. They may have business degrees, PhD’s, and years of business acumen, but being educated, smart and experienced doesn’t make you immune from doing stupid things.
Those who are not fans of DRM of any kind should be extremely leery of this man and the corporation of NDS.
Rupert “I want to rule the world” Murdoch, who owns NDS, is green-lighting this project and he could very well succeed. He has the money, power, and influence to get an audience with all of the major content providers.
As the owner of DirecTV, a vertical market much like the iTunes Store, Murdoch was tormented for years by those who used computers to hack into and unlock all the channels on the DirecTV IC-embedded cards. His engineers finally foiled the hackers using incremental updates until they finally closed the analog hole.
Closing that hole was a tremendous success for Dr. Jas Saini and now Murdoch is telling all of the major content providers that he can do the same for them and while he might have their ears for the moment, Saini is meeting with the major chip makers to convince them to add Secure Video Processors to the silicon mix.
What the content providers have to ask themselves is, do they want to allow NDS (Murdoch by proxy) to become the sole traffic cop on the media distribution highway. Think Gates and his MS-DOS licensing coup with PC builders.
Because if they opt in, then every device manufactured that does not contain an SVP could become a doorstop. Best case scenario for the technology developers who don’t opt in, will be dumbed-down content.
News Corp, also owned by Murdoch, has stated they would like to charge 30 bucks for a single HDTV pay-per-view movie! When you own a vertical market, you can charge whatever you want and run it the way you see fit.
Don, yeah – I saw that, too. And I wondered: does the group actually <u>exclude</u> Apple and Microsoft? Or does the group <u>not include</u> them? Big difference. In that usage, “exclude” would mean “barred from” – the two would not be allowed to join. I suspect they meant “not including either”, as neither asked, or was asked, to join and thus they are not members.
I suspect this is a group that got together, was not taken seriously by the major players, and established a ‘standard’ that nobody has gotten around to implementing yet. Too late, too slow, too little clout, and now a larger player – Apple – has come along with an actual product that makes them redundant. This is not a case of the “battle to be your content multiplexer is on” so much as a case of ‘an army strolled in, set up camp, and took over’. There’s no “battle”. They don’t have a product, they don’t have a vendor, they don’t have a prototype. Maybe MS can get away with blunting the progress of a new product by claiming they have something just like it – but better – coming Real Soon Now, but this group has just been buried.
Sorry, did I not see an HDMI port on the back of the iTV?
Doesn’t HDMI include HDCP?
The back of the iTV—at least the prototype version Apple displayed at last week’s special event—provides ports for power (the power supply itself is internal, so there’s no bulky brick); Ethernet; HDMI (a single connector that outputs digital audio and video, common on many HD televisions); component video (video divided into three components, a connection common on many recent televisions); analog stereo audio (left and right RCA connectors); Toslink digital-audio; and USB 2.0
HDCP is a content protection scheme that scrambles the video until it reaches a HDCP approved device with a DRM chip.
The DRM chips are licensed, have changing keys etc., so the manufacter has to comply with the HDCP rules to protect the content to the screen.
HDMI is just a advanced multi-purpose delivery system, it can handle all sorts of content formats, DRMed with HDCP or not.
Now all the good content in full 1080p (or i) resolution is supposed to be protected with HDCP, if a end device is detected as not HDCP compliant, the content resolution is supposed to drop to a substancially inferior quality.
If Apple gets approval from the monkeys controlling HDCP for the iTV, then it will have the DRM chip to talk to the DRM chip in the HDTV.
Now it depends if Apple gets approval for their computers to carry HDCP, the DRM chip has to be in new Apple monitors. Also supposely the HDCP scheme has been broken already.
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”smile” style=”border:0;” /> But it works through EFI on Intel based Mac’s, it could be a bit hard to break.
If the iTV gets the HDCP DRM chip and not the computers, then perhaps the iTV will have a iTunes menu which movies and TV shows can be ordered over the Ethernet connection.
Perhaps the iTV movies can be transfered to a computer in the lower grade format to play on iPods.
Hollywood is anti-computers, the Macrovision crack pissed them off good.
They might stick to the cable box route as it doesn’t include a processor/OS people can control.
leodavinci…
Talk about drivel! Sharing in the day of vinyl and tape was very different than today, simply due to technology. In the day of vinyl, individuals didn’t have the technology to replicate pressed discs. The damage of sharing to sales wasn’t even a blip to the recording industry. Tape got their attention, and I even knew a guy in the day of 4-and 8-track tape that was prosecuted for selling compilation tapes. But even with the ease of copy that tape afforded, it was not a lossless process. Each generation of copying deteriorted the recording, so once again it didn’t pose a major threat to the profitability of the music industry. The sharing of tapes probably did, in fact, help sales because the quality was so bad that it did encourage people to go buy the original recording. Digital recording has changed everything, so you cannot relate today’s “sharing” with the old model of sharing. A digital file replicates identical to the original. There is no need to go buy a song that someone has “shared” with you today. Not only that, the internet allows a single person to “share” a recording with millions of people around the world. This is NOT your father’s sharing, so please don’t make these comparisons. Don’t get me wrong; the record industry has been corrupt for decades, so I am not not defending them. I just hate this illegitimate comparison to the “music sharing that we’ve always done”. It’s not the same.
Sorry, did I not see an HDMI port on the back of the iTV?
Yes you did. But HDMI and HDCP are two different things. one is a connector, the other is a way to prevent content from being copied.
1. Content has a HDCP flag, which means it can only be sent out of a HDCP hardware device.
(content = Blu-Ray, HD-DVD discs, hardware device = disc players, cable boxes, etc)
2. Hardware devices send HDCP handshakes to HDCP Display devices. If the display is ok with HDCP, the hardware device sends out the best signal possible, and if the display device doesn’t have HDCP, then the hardware device sends out something less, if anything at all
(hardware device = HiDef disc players, Cable boxes, and others, displays = HDTV’s, Projectors, and others.
But in NO CASE would the HDCP display NOT display content from a non-HDCP compliant hardware device, such as the iTV’s HDMI output. If the device doesn’t ask for a HDCP handshake, the display assumes that no HDCP confirmation is needed, and will display whatever content is presented to it. By this I mean that the display device never initiates the HDCP handshake from whatever source is connected to it at the time.
That’s not to say that when the iTV is released, it won’t be HDCP compliant, it may very well be.
Apple is on Intel’s Viiv chipset team. They have all the hardware DRM they need, thanks.
DLMeyer… “They don’t have a product, they don’t have a vendor, they don’t have a prototype”
What are you talking about? Are you referring to Jas Saini and the SVP Alliance?
This Alliance, if you haven’t noticed, includes ADB, AMD, Broadcom, NDS, Phillips, Samsung, SanDisk, Thomson, ATI, DirecTV, LG, Macrovision, NEC, and Texas Instruments to name a few.
Notice they are hardware biased? Read their visionary statements for SVP to see how each of them are embracing this product.
Apple and Microsoft’s DRM are software solutions, that’s why they aren’t invited to the party.
Apple is not a content provider, they are a distributor who wraps content in a software-based DRM and we all know how effective that solution has been.
SVP and it’s partners have raised a compelling argument that states Apple’s wrapper could be made irrelevant with a handshake between devices.
Hm. What this will do is stop the ‘Mom & Pop” copiers from making a copy for their friends. A real pirate can easily buy – or make – technology that will defeat any hardware system. After all, speakers are analog audio and can be tapped; lcd’s are analog or digital and can be tapped.
The result: NetFlix, BlockBuster, & al, get more business from rentals. The media providers, who are also legitimized pirates, reap *no* extra revenue. But they get to help cover the development cost and R&D. The only ones who make significant $ are the chip sellers – smart move TI…
MW: “clear” as in ‘clear out the brain-dead media distributors (Fox, Murdoch, &c), and move on’
“it’s too early to declare a winner.”
Not for some!
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A Check on Reality
Quite frankly Reality, I personally am tired of people like you who glamorize pirates (thieves) and whose attitude is, let’s wait for the pirates to come save us.
In the mean time the content providers just keep plugging away until they arrive at an overkill solution that screws us all over, including the pirates.
We KNOW there are illegal ways to get this stuff, so you’re thoughts on the matter are as useful as turd in a teacup and as irrelevant as your reality.
This thread would better serve us if we knew what we are up against and what options are on the table. The sooner I can see the way ahead, the sooner I can start working the phones and congressional email.
As someone who makes a decent living under the Fair Use provision of the US copyright laws, I worry that if left to their own devices, copyright holders, i.e., content holders/providers and distributors, will kill this provision and life on the internet will become boring, real fast.
Need a typical example of Fair Use in action? How about the 30-second preview of every song on iTunes Store. That can only occur under the Fair Use provision ’cause anything longer would require a license.
Unless you are a creative, an artist, or someone who actually uses his mind and hands to create content, all that I have said probably went in one ear and out the other. However, see if this doesn’t give you a rise… stick your fingers in your ears and blow it out your ass…
MDN MW: wrong, as in just
Spark,
You’re right that it’s not my “father’s sharing.” It’s mine. I’m familar with the music technology advances you point out, having lived as an adult through the introductions, risings and the eventual passings of them.
IMHO, quality of sound reproduction has had little to do with music sharing, however music sharing manifests itself.
Please be aware that I am not justifying nor condoning piracy.
I just do not equate casual sharing (regardless of the technology used) with piracy.
Unlike the music industry (among others). Who appear to be doing so simply because of an often uttered, but unproven, assumption that the widespread use of digital technology by consumers negatively impacts the music industry because “a digital file is as good as the original.” That is a very simplistic explanation for what is really a complicated (and often obfuscated by the music industry itself) situation.
The “digital file is as good as the original and therefore nobody will buy a song that has been shared” mantra is a manifestation of the music industry’s fear, not a conclusion based on facts derived from careful research.
It really doesn’t matter if the Whatever Alliance is “lying down,” standing up, or in a seat. Apple will out-manuever any 35-member committee into the living room, just like iPod/iTunes/iTMS out-paced any “3-member” partnership in portable/digital music.