Hollywood's attempt to force DRM measures on the BBC's over-the-air high-definition broadcasts looks to have come a cropper after intense public pressure.

Encrypting metadata



Hollywood never tires of demanding stronger content protection measures, and in this case the victim of the squeeze play was the BBC. As the BBC prepares to deploy new over-the-air high-definition TV broadcasting at the end of this year, it found that rightsholders were demanding more control over what was broadcast, or they threatened to pull their content. The BBC is "committed to providing the strongest possible HD content lineup on Freeview HD," it says, "but we have to meet content protection obligations for acquired programs"

As a public broadcaster, however, the BBC's Multiplex licenses did not allow it to encrypt the actual audio/video stream. So what to do?

The BBC decided that it would not encrypt the content, but that it would be willing to encrypt the "service information" transmitted along with the show using Huffman compression. The SI metadata delivers all sorts of useful information, such a show names, start times, program guide information, etc., that are crucial to the set-top boxes used to decompress and display the content.

A digital broadcasting standard called the DTG D-Book specifies all sorts of copy protection and control measures that box makers can take to lock down content, but these are currently not mandatory for device makers, and third-party set-top box makers can easily build boxes which ignore the D-Book copy protection specs entirely.

The BBC decided that the way forward would be to encrypt the service information used by the boxes, then to freely distribute the tools to decrypt it—but only to set-top box makers who agreed to fully implement the D-Book copy protection specs.

The solution, which was quite ingenious, was passed along to the government regulator Ofcom to see if it might actually be legal. On September 3, Ofcom replied (PDF) that the scheme would require a modification to the BBC's multiplex license, but that Ofcom was willing to make such a change. It even suggested a bit of draft text that could be amended to the license. But first, the public would have to be consulted.

Backlash

And the public did not like the idea at all. As one respondent pointed out, the actual D-Book spec remains a secret, and therefore "it is not clear exactly what additional content-control capabilities rightsholders will be able to exercise. For example, it is entirely plausible that these controls will include: time-limits for how long recordings may be stored; playback-limits governing how many times recordings may be rendered; capability-limits governing exactly what kinds of audio/video interfaces content may be rendered towards; playback restrictions preventing the skipping of interstitial advertisements; and so on."

Yesterday, Ofcom sent the BBC a second letter. "Ofcom received a large number of responses to this consultation, in particular from consumers and consumer groups, who raised a number of potentially significant consumer ‘fair use’ and competition issues that were not addressed in our original consultation," it noted. "In view of these responses we have decided not to approve a multiplex licence change without giving these issues further consideration."

That means a new round of comments and evidence, but the questions in this round are quite pointed:

The anticipated benefits to citizens and consumers, and to the DTT platform, of the proposed approach;

How you propose to address the potential disadvantages to citizens and consumers associated with the impact on the receiver market under the proposed approach;

An explanation of potential alternative approaches that would impact less on the receiver market, and the extent to which those alternatives would be able to deliver similar outcomes and benefits for citizens and consumers.

In the meantime, Auntie is instructed to provide SI decryption information to all set-top box makers without a license.

If the debate sounds depressingly familiar, it should; the US has been treated to the same fear-mongering rhetoric about piracy for years, much of it with the same goal: government-mandated controls on the way devices are built. Hollywood actually convinced the FCC to mandate a broadcast flag that TVs, DVD recorders, and TiVos would all have to follow—until the courts shut that one down. Now, the MPAA is pushing hard for the FCC to grant it Selectable Output Control (SOC), which can shut off specific outputs to better protect "high-value" content transmitted in HD.

Ofcom's hesitation looks like good news for consumers. Although the BBC points out in its initial letter that HD content is special "owing to its high quality and premium nature," it's not hard to believe that any encryption put in place today would remain in effect long after HD content ceased to be "premium" simply by virtue of being in HD.

But rightsholders aren't obligated to allow their content to be shown, and might well try to pressure the BBC further by refusing to license TV shows and movies for broadcast in the UK until DRM reigns supreme. Such threats were made in the US, too, but have largely failed to materialize. The BBC worries that its ability to show the World Cup in HD could be affected by Ofcom's move, but US broadcasters have had no trouble showing Olympics coverage and Super Bowls in HD for years even without a (mandatory) broadcast flag or SOC.