Meet the new boss, Cable Labs' DTCP-IP
By Steven Kim 
posted Aug 27th 2007 11:59AM
posted Aug 27th 2007 11:59AM
CableLabs' latest DRM scheme, DTCP-IP (Digital Transmission Copy Protection), got approval from a number of movie studios last week. This new streaming protocol is an extension of the DTCP protection on FireWire links, and is supposed to allow secured sharing of digital content within a home network. How secure? According to the CableLabs CEO, the new protocol allows for the "same level of protection, functionality, and treatment of content" as with AACS. Ahem. If that's true, count on a crack before the standard ever sees the light of day. Still, we're hoping that this will open up possibilities for TiVO functionality that has gone missing, like To-Go and Multi-Room Viewing. We also wonder what the real definition of a "home network" means to CableLabs -- could this spell trouble for place-shifting devices like the Slingbox?
It doesn't mean anything for Slingbox really. This is strictly local. The security for DTCP-IP even include a latency limit - I'd have to look it up, but I think it is 8ms. More than that an it is blocked - so no remote connections.
Plus the content is shared as is - large MPEG-2 files don't stream so well over the net. Sling's 'magic' is dynamically adjusting the stream to maximize quality for the given bandwidth while remaining usable.