Mo McRoberts wrote:
Not quite what I meant by “open market”. There was never a requirement in the past for CE makers to join logo/licensing programmes to ensure their kit worked—they just followed the specs. That wasn’t limited to CE makers, either, which is how things like MythTV came to exist. FTA isn’t that “anybody can receive the broadcasts [if they buy from one of our approved manufacturers]” it’s “anybody can receive the broadcasts provided what they have adheres to the open specs”.
Yes even a certification scheme, is likely to exclude Myth TV etc. No hardware to certify, and the source code is constantly modified.
It’s harder when you’ve got Internet-based delivery, because you have to hand over both the crypto mechanism and the decryption key to something which is primarily under user control—it’s not a “black box” in the same way that an STB or TV is. But, it’s not something those doing Internet-based delivery don’t often attempt to do (look at iPlayer Desktop, for example).
If internet delivery is the primary delivery mechanism, then it is likely to be a STB style black box, or built into the TV, at the consumer end. I think this is the intention, of the rights-holders. I would not be surprised if they attempted to exclude open hardware (PC's).
- Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
