July 21, 2008
DVR and STB designers rejoice: Gemstar is kinder and gentler (again!)
By Cliff Roth

For years -- decades actually --

To anyone unfamiliar with the Gemstar patent saga, this story will sound absolutely zany, but it's true. I can attest first hand to the difficulties of trying to create a program guide in the U.S., having spent about seven years working for a company (Gist) that attempted to create a competing EPG, and was thwarted every step of the way by the Gemstar patents. To make a very long story short, Gemstar simply wouldn't return phone calls or correspondence from anyone who asked to license their patents. And anyone who went ahead and created an EPG without their blessing was sued -- at least anyone with deep enough pockets for them to collect from. They sued Scientific Atlanta. They sued TiVo. They sued Echostar (Dish TV). Even Microsoft -- a company not easily intimidated -- was convinced to pay Gemstar roughly $40 million for the right to create their own EPG in Windows Media Center.

Now Macrovision -- the company famous for analog video copy protection -- says they will license the patents fairly and openly, with a catalog and price list. If the notion of a kinder, gentler Gemstar sounds vaguely familiar, it's because we've heard this talk before. After Henry Yuen, the founder and driving force of Gemstar was convinced to resign due to financial irregularities at the company, Gemstar said their policies would change. But they didn't. Now, however, with new owners, the shift appears to be real and sincere.

Of course, the only way to know will be for product designers to get on the phone and actually start negotiating for licenses for Gemstar's EPG patents. To some, the very notion of having to pay a license fee to present an onscreen program guide may seem outrageous, but that's a different story. The patents do exist (mostly from the acquisition of StarSight, an early EPG) and to date, no one has successfully had a court disqualify them -- even though one could argue that, for example, a train schedule or printed grid guide represents prior art.

Design engineers reading this are encouraged to share their Gemstar and EPG experiences -- good or bad. Please visit our Forums section.

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July 11, 2008
Privacy and video technology
By Cliff Roth

The recent passage of U.S. President Bush's domestic wiretap and email spying legislation (FISA) makes this an appropriate time to review how

There are two main areas of concern: watching us, and watching what we watch. Sometimes both get combined.

Surveillance video is everywhere, as many readers of this space know better than most. The number of surveillance cameras globally has exploded over the past few years, and the end is nowhere in sight. While this is great for the market for video cameras, analytics, storage, and other businesses, and it's rarely an engineer's responsibility to weigh the societal implications of his or her work, as citizens we must all sometimes take a step back and ponder the bigger questions of where things are heading.

Fortunately, "private spaces" still exist, where these surveillance cameras don't see. Our homes remain relatively free of video surveillance -- at least most of us think so, unless we install it ourselves for home security, and in the U.S. there is hopefully a court order to surreptitiously install it! Plus the increasing use of IP surveillance cameras with built in analytics may actually mean that, as time goes by, far fewer surveillance images are actually viewed by police and security agencies, despite the increasing number of cameras. (Because intelligent cameras will only transmit images of something suspicious.)

Potentially more troubling, in terms of privacy invasion, are the new technologies that track what we watch. There are many examples of this viewer tracking already, including TiVo, YouTube (and practically all of the Internet for that matter), and VOD services from cable-TV and cell phone companies, to name a few. But as the cable-TV industry's little-known (outside the industry) "Project Canoe" takes off, ads on cable-TV will become specifically targeted to each individual household, based in part on tracking what people watch -- and that means every program they watch, not just on-demand titles.

For advertisers, the biggest problem with targeted commercials is that -- except for people living alone -- many TVs are shared by several members of a household. How does the TV or set top box know who is watching? Many schemes have been devised over the years to address this issue, including buttons on remotes for people to voluntarily log in, and electronically profiling people based on how they use the TV -- how quickly they change channels, which channels they go to, etc.

The most invasive approach of all combines the first thread of this blog with the second, by actually putting a video camera into the living room, to see who is watching.

There are many shades of gray here, but having in-home cameras that spy on us, ostensibly so that advertisers can know who is watching what, is going too far.

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June 30, 2008
Enhancing display performance
By Cliff Roth

Here's a roundup of recent articles about improving

LCD image processing enhances mobile display quality while saving power

Rapid progress in high-brightness LEDs for Projection TVs

OLED power driver enhances image quality for small form factor displays

Display differentiation: DisplayPort and tips for next-generation screens

Simulating display characteristics of embedded applications for consistent graphics

Dolby Contrast and Dolby Vision technology: A breakthrough in TV viewing

D-ILA projector technology: The path to high resolution projection displays

Lens Shift: How one simple projection feature can save time and money

Adaptive dimming and adaptive boosting backlight technologies for LCD-TV systems

Deinterlacing with source, motion and edge-adaptive processing reduces artifacts on HDTVs

Your walls will be changing

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June 23, 2008
FCC may make DVR design harder, and limit functionality
By Cliff Roth

The movie industry wants to create a new category of cable-TV and satellite-TV and broadcast-TV content that would lock out

It's bad for the consumer, and it's bad for the manufacturers and designers of consumer video equipment. It would lead to confusion, and ultimately, fewer sales of home video recording equipment as it becomes less functional.

The "Selectable Output Control" (SOC) that the MPAA wants the FCC to activate would prevent Digital Video Recorders (DVRs) from recording recently released films. Of course, that's just what they're saying they want to use it for now. In the future, who knows how much additional content will become off-limits to home recording.

In essence, this is an attempt to overturn the landmark U.S. Supreme Court "Betamax Decision" back in the 1984, which asserted the consumer's "right" (in quotes here because it appears to be up for grabs) to record video material that can be received on a TV set at home, for playback in the home.

Sony is arguably in the most conflicted situation here. As a consumer electronics giant, Sony has long been a dominant force behind the faux grass roots-named "Home Recording Rights Coalition", whose information desk has been a staple of the Consumer Electronics Show for decades. It was Sony, after all, who fought Hollywood in that landmark Supreme Court ruling -- in fact, Sony's legal troubles back in the 70s may have ultimately contributed to the eventual dominance of the competing VHS format.

Flash forward to 2008 and now Sony also owns one of the big Hollywood movie studios -- the very force that's behind this effort to clamp down on home recording. (The FCC petition was signed by Sony Pictures, Paramount Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal, Disney, and Warner Brothers.)

Much has changed in the intervening years too though, including the widespread consumer acceptance of an outrageously restrictive DRM system for music in the popular iTunes platform and iPod hardware (to its credit, the European Community is currently fighting that battle almost single-handedly, but that's another story.) It will be interesting to see which side of this new DRM battle Sony ultimately comes down on.

(Note: The FCC is accepting comments until July 7th on this issue. If you'd like to add your thoughts -- or your company's position on this critical issue for consumer electronics -- click here. The docket number for field #1 "proceeding" is 08-82.)
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