Q  A lot of those folks—and I’m one of them, too—are worried that their A/V equipment is going to become obsolete when the analog hole is closed. The MPAA has a reputation for caring nothing about consumer rights. That’s the perception.
 
A  I want to set the record straight about where we are. We want to move forward, but we don’t want to disenfranchise the early adopters. We need to create a framework for the future to be able to deliver high-def content—potentially “early window” high-definition content—so we can do some exciting things in the future as people’s home theaters and TVs improve.
There are a lot of steps involved in moving from an analog distribution world to a digital distribution world, and we have to work on that. We can’t do this without the cooperation and close work with the consumer electronics and computer industry, so I can talk about a number of things we’re working on, and how we feel we’re not going to disenfranchise the early adopter.

Hollywood and the MPAA are on a quest to “plug the analog hole,” a catchy way of expressing their desire to cripple analog outputs.

Q  How do you respond to the people who say that the MPAA wants to limit the signal quality through component video connections on next-generation DVD?

A  Well, we have to be very specific about which digital delivery system we’re talking about in terms of the functionally of what we call “image constraining” unprotected high-definition analog outputs. So let me cover one very specific implementation that’s all very public information and discuss how it might be used. I stress the word might.
 
CableLabs, the research lab for the cable industry, has come up with an OpenCable specification. The consumer can buy a digital-cable-ready tuner or TV with a CableCard slot. Call up your cable operator to receive a cable card, plug it in, and now your set is digital cable ready.
 
[If that device] has no high-definition analog outputs there won’t be any impact on quality. In the case of a tuner that’s feeding an old legacy HDTV display, like you and I have, the cable operator can flag high-definition content to be image constrained over the unprotected analog output. Here’s the rationale: Unlike standard-definition analog outputs that can have Macrovision copy protection on ‘copy-never’ content—a very defined set of programs like video-on-demand and pay-per-view movies—there is no copy protection for high-definition analog outputs.

So what [the industry] agreed upon was that the content owner could decide to image constrain the high-def analog output—and the resolution doesn’t drop to standard definition. The OpenCable specification is half the number of lines and half the number of pixels for a
1080i signal, or 960 pixels by 540 lines, progressively scanned. But once you constrain the image, there are no restrictions on using any advanced spatial or temporal upconversion of that content to output an HDlike signal. And since the system is optional, some content owners may never use image constraint because they see that as a competitive disadvantage for selling their high-definition movies over VOD or pay-per-view.

Q  So how visible is that?
 
A  We conducted a number of tests here on different displays, and what we quickly realized was that nearly all of the legacy HDTV displays with analog-only inputs are CRT-based—that’s what I have—and most of them don’t resolve all 1920 by 1080 pixels. We did some demos where we took full resolution 1920 by 1080 content, we image constrained that content, then we up-rezzed that content using standard spatial interpolation, and we then created a 26 megabit per second MPEG2 file recorded on a D-VHS cassette. Then we played a demo where we A/B’d constrained versus unconstrained, and we couldn’t see a difference.
 
There’s a lot of misinformation about how the early adopters with analog-only inputs are going to be disadvantaged if—if—content owners use an image- constrained signal, but we never were able to demonstrate any disadvantage.

Clearly, the new generation of HD sets, like DLP and LCD displays that have a full 1920 by 1080 progressive-scan image, they would certainly see a difference in those, with regard to image constraint. It would be very subtle. But the idea is that those sets have the protected digital interconnects.
 
Q  But let’s get back on track and talk about next-gen DVD. This image constraint is what we will potentially be seeing on HD-DVD and Blu-ray, correct?
 
A  That’s correct. But it is a competitive marketplace of content owners selling high-def content. They recognize that many of the people they want to sell this content to are early adopters with display devices that don’t have digital connections. They don’t want to disenfranchise those people because they will be the first buyers of this content. But over time, they want to give the marketplace an incentive to embrace the protected digital outputs, and hopefully watch the marketplace walk away from analog connections, which really don’t have any benefits.

There are so many benefits of a completely end-to-end digital home theater system. When you go through an analog connection, you’ve got to convert the signal, and when the signal goes into a digital display, like a DLP projector, you have to sample and re-digitize it, so there is a lot of loss there.
 
Image constraint is one way to create marketplace incentive to get people to use these protected digital connections instead of analog connections. But it’s not really powerful. The problem we face is that we can have all of this protected content delivery, but all of that has to be converted to analog because we have a lot of analog TVs that we have to feed. Since analog is not self-protecting, there are a lot of very high-quality analog-to-digital converters that can take the analog signal and make a very high-quality digital signal out of that, with no protection, and no obligation to look at any rights that are in that, which basically allows for unlimited copies and unlimited redistribution over the internet. Say that the content in that case is escaping through the analog hole. The idea is that we really need to find a way to manage the rights with an analog signal to the equivalent means as if it had gotten through a protected digital connection.

There is work going on to develop a process by which an analog signal can carry copy control signals and redistribution signals that would actually allow, in a standardized way, the detection of those rights at the point of analog-to-digital conversion and then trigger copy protection in the process of making a secure recording. We’re working with the CE and IT industries to find a means for solving this dilemma.

Q  How do you respond to the person who says that the MPAA is so concerned with piracy that they’re not thinking about the convenience of the consumer?

A  Our goal for copy protection is that it’s transparent to the honest user. When you buy a DVD in a store and bring it home, you put it in your player and you don’t really know that there’s copy protection. DVD was a success when it was introduced because that copy protection allowed content owners to release prerecorded media in a digital format without the fear that the content could be perfectly copied and distributed.

In the last eight years, though, what we’ve learned is that the current DVD copy protection system, CSS, is really a first-generation digital copy protection system, and we all recognize that there is a hack of it—but I think what we also recognize is that it’s pretty restrictive in terms of allowing consumers to use content like they want to use it today. Nine years ago we didn’t have media servers and portable video devices, and the idea of locking content to a piece of plastic made a lot of sense. It allowed us to launch a digital media format. Now we’re starting to realize that we’ve got media center PCs and portable devices that store several movies, so we must work on the next generation of content protection for both prerecorded movies as well as recordable movies that facilitate things like a managed copy onto a media server from a prerecorded disc, or the ability to digitally move content from a disc onto a portable device. We’re already working on amending the DVD license to provide new functionality like secure home networking.

Q  Is there any concern that the fear of copy restriction is going to hinder the success of next-generation DVD at all?

A  One, the early adopter of HDTV is the guy that the studios want to sell to. He’s the movie guy who bought the HD set before everyone else because he wanted the better picture. There are going to be some companies who refuse to use image constraint simply because they don’t want to alienate that early adopter. It’ll be a competitive marketplace. If the marketplace starts seeing those analog, high-definition recorders with no response to copy control signaling––and people are making high-definition rips—if I was a content owner, I would definitely start thinking about using image constraint.

In some ways, the implementation of these rights-triggering mechanisms is more of a future-use thing [something that can be implemented] if the market moves that way, or maybe a way to move the market in a certain way—but from my standpoint, I’m sitting here with a CRT television myself, so I know how these people feel.

“Nine years ago we didn’t have media servers and portable video devices, and the idea of locking content to a piece of plastic made sense.”

Q  I recently reviewed a DVD player for this magazine that also doubles as a DivX format player. And I theoretically broke quite a few laws while doing the review. But the conclusion I came away with, and the point of the review, is that it’s still not worth the hassle. It took me ten hours to download a film that didn’t look as good as the DVD in the first place because of the compression. And that was packing 4.5 gigabytes [GB] into 1 GB. HD on DVD already uses some of the most advanced compression algorithms around, and we’re still talking about 10, 20, even 30 GB of data. Do you think the size of high-definition films, already compressed with better technology than the bootleggers are using now, will impede transmission of Blu-ray or HD-DVD films on the internet? Is the time-sink alone not enough impedance?
 
A  Is compression technology going to stop with MPEG4? No. We have a paper that does some projections about downloading speeds and compression codec efficiencies, and it’s going to continue on, so I think there is great concern that, as technology advances, this will continue to be a problem in terms of compressing and uploading high-definition movies. Then you throw something like Internet2 on top of that, and it can be a very challenging world we’re going to face.

The whole area of anti-piracy and copy protection is that you’re trying to keep lazy people honest, and we’re now moving into the next generation where we can have renewability of software-based protection as well as device-level revocation when a device key is broken.
For the consumers who are using legitimate devices and using content in a legitimate manner, our hope is that the copy protection is transparent. They’re not going to know. But the guy who downloads a hack—because someone invested $100,000 to break an encryption key and made an application that circumvents the copy protection system—will be affected. The next disc that comes out will have a revocation key to disable those hacks.
But without the consumer, we don’t sell content. We don’t make any money keeping these movies locked up in a vault.

Q  What about the HDTV broadcast flag? Initially the FCC required a copy protection flag for all terrestrially broadcast high-definition content. The Court of Appeals overturned that ruling. That’s a very big topic of conversation between my editors and me.
 
A  That’s not going to go away. We think it’s really important. The Court of Appeals didn’t appeal the regulation based on the fact that the broadcast flag made no sense or that it would hurt consumers. The only reason for the appeal is that they said the FCC doesn’t have jurisdiction to mandate copy protection. We’re going to address that because we think it’s important in terms of facilitating the DTV transition that free-to-air broadcasting remains a viable way to digitally deliver content. It is the only digital delivery system that today has no means of encrypting from the source, like cable and satellite, and we want to keep free-to-air TV as a viable system, carrying high-value content, drama, and movies, and not watch it devolve into game shows and reality TV that has no redistribution value. That’s why it’s a really important initiative.

Conclusion: As with every story, this one has two sides and the truth lies somewhere in the middle—somewhere between the warnings of the EFF and the reassurances of the MPAA. Hunt repeatedly stresses that these security measures are optional, but do you really trust the movie studios to keep your best interest in mind? Yet, he seems to understand the potential loss of revenue if consumers view the copy protection as too stringent. It’s going to be interesting to see how this issue affects the success or failure of future HD formats.