Make Free

HIGH-DEFINITION

EQUALS HIGHLY DEADLY

By Cory Doctorow

W HO KNEW THAT HIGH-DEFINITION television would prove so deadly? The way I see it, HD could precipitate great harm to open source (and the tinkerers who love it), competition, free speech, and the right to remix, not to mention the bottom lines for the studios and today’s TV stars.

Standard-def TV might be a little fugly (NTSC: Never Twice Same Color!), but it has this virtue: anyone can implement it. There are no patents lurking in SD, no copyrights, no license agreements. In 1979, I plugged an Apple II+ into a standard TV set. Today, I can connect a Slingbox to it. The world is full of these cheap and dirty displays, and innumerable revolutions owe their success to this fact, from Pong to the PC.

High-def is different. Between DRM and patents, it’s nearly impossible to make an HD set that receives content from the widest pool of HD devices — like DVD-HD and Blu-Ray players, and many HD consoles — without a lot of butt-kissing. If you want to go near this stuff, prepare to build neutered devices that won’t upset anyone’s apple cart. You have to please media executives who think that skipping commercials should be a crime.

It gets worse. The studios are bent on bringing something called the Broadcast Flag (in the U.S. and Canada) and DVB-CPCM (in the rest of the world) to HD. This would require anyone building an HD receiver to ensure that it couldn’t be used in connection with open source (“user modifiable”) software, and that any implementers must license an “approved” anti-copying system that will come loaded with all sorts of conditions about how you can and can’t build a device. Forget plugging in a PC, Pong console, or even a Slingbox.

Because PCs are potential HD tuners, this rule will encourage manufacturers of commodity components — like hard drives and video cards — to follow the same rules so that their products can

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be used in HDTV. Goodbye open platforms, hello monopoly lockware.

But will the public buy HD sets in large numbers? Maybe not. After all, contemporary programming looks pretty weird in high-def. Check out an HD episode of Friends — Courteney Cox does not improve at higher resolutions. Every pore gapes, the hair-sprayed coiffure looks as stiff and unnatural as a corset, and the standard-def cute moues and pouts become grotesque comedy masks at high-res.

If HDTV has a future, it’s in the invention of a new art form that exploits the inherent characteristics of the medium. Rather than trying to bridge the “uncanny valley” in HD, a savvy director might instead stick several low-res pictures on the screen

Forget plugging in a PC, Pong Console, or Slingbox. Goodbye open platforms, hello monopoly lockware.

at once, overlapping them and bringing parts of them forward and back, like the hyperactive display on a customized World of Warcraft environment or your own PC desktop.

And if that’s too weird, there’s plenty of room at the bottom: tiny HD screens forgive many of the sins that are starkly revealed by wall-hogging monster TVs.

Cory Doctorow ( craphound.com) is a science fiction novelist, blogger, and technology activist. He is co-editor of the popular weblog Boing Boing ( boingboing.net), and a contributor to Wired, Popular Science, and The New York Times.