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.