FCC: Cable To Support In-Home HD Content Streaming by 2014

[sholling]

This looks interesting. Hopefully they'll do a better job than they did with sometimes painful and often crippled cable card system. I wonder how they are going to handle studio mandated encryption of streamed or recorded shows.

Cable companies ordered to support HD content streaming within homes by 2014 | The Verge

The FCC has ordered cable operators (and TiVo) to update their cable boxes to include support for HD streaming over home networks to devices like PCs, smart TVs, and tablets. In addition to video streaming, cable boxes must also allow HD video recording on external devices through home networks. By June 2nd 2014 the vast majority of set top boxes will have to support an open standard,

 

[Gordonj]

It will be interesting to see how the cable companies continue to develop their own protocal for meeting this requirement.

Gordon

 

[Grador]

I hope this ends up being a usable solution, but looking at the past I'm sure the cable companies will find a way to add so many hoops to jump through that the end result is a completely unusable system.

 

[sholling]

It should be interesting to see where this goes. Supposedly it'll be a super-duper DLNA system. Hopefully they do a better job than the current Chinese menu of features DLNA "standard" and the crippled cable card system.

I'm also bot sure how they'll be able to share video unless the FCC bans encryption of stored content. The only other way I can think of is to write clients for every possible operating system with a shared key but that defeats the purpose of encryption. Frankly I hope the FCC bans encryption because it's a total PIA. I just had to swap out DVRs because the old one died and all of the content stored on my 40% full external drive was lost because the encryption is tied to the DVR. It's not like encryption even slows professional copiers - all it does it make things harder on honest customers.

The other thing

 

[Grador]

I was reading up on the possible use of DLNA a little, and I hope it doesn't go that way at all. I've never had anything but trouble with DLNA even before you add a content protection scheme on top of it.

As for encrypted storage, DLNA could actually work with that as you'd do playback on the local storage and stream to the displaying device. That said, I have literally never gotten non-local playback working on anything I have ever tried with DLNA devices/software.

 

[sholling]

I was reading up on the possible use of DLNA a little, and I hope it doesn't go that way at all.

I've gotten it to work for some things but it's a mess. The biggest problem is it's a Chinese menu, DLNA server manufacturers pick and choose what features they want to include and how they want to do it and DLNA player manufacturers pick and choose what features that they want to support and if one or both leave out something you need you're just out of luck. The right way to do it is to set an actual standard i.e. "you will include all of these features and implement them this way if you want to claim DLNA 3.0 certification". That's a standard and as new features are developed you create a 3.1 or 3.2 standard. If you look at networking standard you'll see that an Apple will talk to a Cisco which will talk to a D-Link which will talk to a Dell. That's because the standards are set in stone and nothing changes until a new standard is agreed to.

You could use DLNA to stream video to computers, appliances, tablets, and phones but you either have to decrypt at the set top box/server or the client. If at the client you need a way to get the decryption key the client and write clients for each device. That'll either be a nightmare to maintain or to use depending on their priorities.