UK TV broadcasters to tackle piracy with DRM

It seems that digitial rights management (DRM) is not dead and buried, in fact it looks as if new DRM standards could be deployed at the request of the UK Freeview operators, to prevent the unauthorised copying of HD content from set top boxes and PVRs.

The BBC has contacted the regulator Ofcom to request that the terrestrial digital HD signal be encrypted so that only certain set top boxes and PVRs are able to record from Freeview.

The suggestion is that some metadata will be encoded into the digital TV channels with the algorithm kept as a top secret, but this is not going to prevent copying as such and so is not likely to prevent piracy as such.