Secure Video Processor Alliance not about to take Apple’s living room incursion lying down

18 years ago

“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.