Macrovision Inc, Mountain View, and Philips Electronics NV’s Philips Semiconductors came together at the National Association of Broadcasters trade show this week to announce that Philips’ new NTSC and PAL colour encoder chips will include Macrovision’s patented pay-per-view anti-copy system. The system will enable manufacturers of digital compressed video set-top decoders to buy off-the-shelf components implementing copy protection, securely embedded inside a single integrated circuit so that there is no way to bypass it without screwing up the decoder. Macrovision plans to license the technology for use by hardware manufacturers and pay-per-view distributors such as cable, satellite, and telcommunications operators, making it easier for the home entertainment industry to control the home piracy threat against video-on-demand services. The Philips digital NTSC and PAL encoder chips are designed to convert decompressed digital video input into an analogue video output compatible with all current video cassete recorders and televisions. Philips sees the parts being used wherever digital video is recorded or transmitted to the home and there is a requirement to play the video on a standard television. The company says it believes that Macrovision may be applicable in interactive video products such as Philips’ Compact Disk-Interactive, games machines and multimedia computers. To copy-protect a particular programme, the rights owner directs the distributor to turn on the Macrovision circuit in the individual decoders by inserting encrypted codes into the video transmission. Each set-top decoder would then have its Macrovision-component circuitry individually addressed and activated through the network’s addressable access control system.
