Reuters: Digital TV Ain’t Gonna Be Free. I think this article is actually optimistic; if the broadcast flag passes, you just won’t be able to record HDTV at all, because products that meet the robustness requirements would be so crippled they’d be unprofitable. [Hack the Planet]
The trick will be to get a set-top with HD-DVR capabilities and built-in DVD recording. Assuming they are allowed. I am currently experimenting… trying to capture video from my Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8000… so far no dice. Just discovered it’s encrypted… even if I could reach it I would not be able to read it.
More on Digital TV from Werbach…
I don’t know where to start. The idea that digital TV adoption has been slow because of piracy fears is just plain silly. If we’d had the broadcast flag earlier, people would have rushed out to buy multi-thousand dollar sets so they could watch two or three channels of digital programming (which most cable operators just started offering in the last year)? Spare me. And the comment about new technology always being non-backward-compatible is a bad joke. It’s instructive that this is the attitude. Users shouldn’t expect that consumer electronics products they buy will work; the content industry reserves the right to blow them if it feels threatened. Ain’t progress grand?
[Werblog]