An aside from Marquee
“The industry should rise to the occasion and solve this. How can it be that as broadcasters we’re in a position where the tuner decides how we broadcast content?”
Well, the industry has solved it, many times over. The BBC continually acceding the idiotic demands of rights-holders that content be “protected” by DRM—which only goes to inconvenience legitimate users and runs roughshod over the concept of “free-to-air”, not to mention the codified time-shifting right (last amended: 2003) which is being continually eroded thanks to advances in technology being met with equal reduction in flexibility on the part of the consumer—is the root cause of this.
Internet-based streaming is complicated enough as it is, in no small part due to the difficulty in getting ISPs to stop dropping multicast packets on the floor and the expectation that H.264 will (as of next year) involve exorbitant fees for broadcasters in return for IP rights.
Of course, the BBC did solve it—in the form of Dirac, but has failed to capitalise on it except internally (and my sources suggest that it may well now be going nowhere fast).
Heaven forbid that the BBC got behind an open-ended architecture which allows CE manufacturers and software developers alike to support new Internet-based broadcast initiatives alongside whatever they already have. That would be too easy, wouldn’t it?
Instead, we have car-crashes such as the revised Project Canvas proposals which mandate that interested broadcasters play by the BBC’s gatekeeping rules (which costs money, and so they must also join a consortium with a mandated financial commitment), and CE manufacturers must embrace the specified “user experience” (specified right down to which menus must appear where).
Surely Eric Huggers gets this? Being charitable, I’m assuming he does, and just can’t say it—if that’s the case, though, there’s an even bigger problem than if he doesn’t get it.
