An agreement has been reached between representatives from the entertainment and consumer electronics industries and US legislators on a system to prevent digital television broadcasts from being pirated over the internet.
Executives from companies such as AOL Time Warner and News Corp have participated in the talks with the House Energy and Commerce Committee. They have agreed on technical standards for a new ‘watermark’ to be embedded in all digital TV broadcasts, TVs, computers and other devices used to decipher digital TV signals.
The threat of piracy has long dogged the progress of digital TV in the US, News Corp president Peter Chernin said that the ‘watermark’ question was the “single biggest issue” slowing the spread of digital television, and predicted that the agreement would “rapidly speed up this transition”.
Digital TV has yet to capture the imagination of US consumers. US broadcasters are supposed to convert all of their signals to digital but that transition has been slowed by piracy concerns, the high cost of digital equipment and a paucity of digital content.
