Tumbled Logic

headlessness:

It worries me that, if there’s a lack of in-house boffins to answer the technical questions, there’s a lack of in-house boffins to make, or advise on the technical decisions that have landed the BBC in this pickle in the first place. Let’s see them outsource their way out of this one.

Here lies the problem. The BBC isn’t used to engaging directly with people who, while not experts in the field being discussed, do know enough that putting a social media (PR) bod in front of the audience just doesn’t cut it.

The BBC could’ve solved a lot of the confusion by, from the outset, saying:

We’re planning to compress the EIT carried as part of the SI. We’ll retain the rights to the Huffman code tables you need to decompress it. That’s all we’re doing.

It wouldn’t have answered many of the fundamental questions, but it would have prevented confusion and ambiguity, which has made the issue a hundred times more difficult and opaque than it should be.

As it stands, I’m still waiting on confirmation that it is just the EIT which will be affected. It seems likely, having re-read everything, but it’s not explicitly stated by the letter of enquiry to Ofcom, nor the letter to stakeholders the regulator sent out.

For what it’s worth, the DVB BlueBook states (§5.1, A038r6):

The tables, when transmitted shall not be scrambled, with the exception of the EIT, which may be scrambled if required (see clause 5.1.5).

Now, scrambling the EIT and protecting them via NDA is an inconvenience. It’s not a showstopper unless you’re either (a) incapable or unwilling to obtain the necessary code tables via alternative means (or obtain the same information held in the EIT by some other mechanism), or (b) wishing to produce a DVB-T2 decoder which can receive Freeview HD. That is, legitimate users. Pirates can get around it absolutely and utterly trivially.

Of course, the rights-holders have been convinced that this will have some sort of significant effect on piracy, even though this is blatantly false. So, in actual fact, we have two problems:

1. The people at the BBC tasked with engaging the public aren’t able to give a straight answer (because they’re not the technical types).
2. If they did give a straight answer, they would scupper the whole plan because it’d make it clear that it achieves the exact opposite of the intended effect.

So we’re left with a middle-ground: the blog editor publishes posts authored by somebody technical enough to know all of the above, but it avoids spelling it out because that would give the game away. This perhaps also explains why the “consultation” (if you can call it that) was quite so fuzzy.

Chaos ensues.