All posts by Briantist
Below are all of Briantist's postings, with the most recent are at the bottom of the page.
MikeP: I'll come back to that in a moment. but I always go with the Oxford English Dictionary which goes for the "z" spellings: authorization: definition of authorization in Oxford dictionary (British & World English) !
| link to this comment |
MikeP: I agree, there are lots of other possibilities. Certainly there are lots of sets out there without digital (DVB-T) tuners built in where a set-top box (standard or PVR) is used.
It just seems a bit odd to me that some people seem to be of the opinion that the BBC channels can be encrypted and not realise that an encrypted service needs a DECRYPTION end too.
Still, "Alvin's Secret Code" was one of my favouite books as a kid. Alvin's Secret Code eBook: Clifford B. Hicks: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store
Anyway, there are over 10 million homes with "Freeview only" , and all the stats suggest that these people probably have, on average, two TVs.
As far as "the internet" is concerned: yes there are people without it. The best I can come up with (as dial-up is 100% dead) is to include a small 3G device in the box to get a connection that way, if there isn't a wifi or ethernet (even - urgh - powerline) available.
Given that the data needed to do an authorization would be trivial, a few packets here and there, using IP rather than post+smartcard is a good proposition.
Also, you might as well provide iPlayer with the box.
The problem remains: up to 20 million devices in "Freeview only" homes and another 9 million devices
Whatever Andrew Bridgen, MP most genuine concern for "155,000 people were convicted of not having a TV licence", it means for every one of them, 188 Freeview boxes are going to end up on the scrap-heap!
| link to this comment |
A Jamieson: I presume that you have powered down the box at the mains for several minutes and then restarted?
| link to this comment |
R Shead: If you're not clear about my criterial then I did lay them out here BBC 2017: Which of these 14 options is best to collect 4 billion quid a year? | BBC 2017 | ukfree.tv - 11 years of independent, free digital TV advice
for example
"How do people opt out of the system if they don't wish to take part?
You can opt out of paying for the BBC is you select to not have a TV. The score here is low if the proposed system has no opt-out for those who oppose the service. "
| link to this comment |
R Shead: Your points are interesting.
Don't sweat the scoring system too much, it was there to organise the possibilities into some kind of order.
The point is that all these alternatives have merits and problems, thus the inability of anyone over the last 90 years to come up with a workable alternative to the hypothecated tax on owning the receiver!
| link to this comment |
michael: I use my old BT corporate style guide "Right for your Reader" as the rule-book for this site.
| link to this comment |
michael: It's worth pointing out that BBC World, the TV news service is part of BBC Worldwide and makes of (modest) profit.
The thing that costing lots of money (£255.2m) is the BBC World Service, which is a network of radio stations in *Arabic
Azeri, Bengali, *Burmese, Cantonese, *French for Africa, *Hausa, *Hindi, *Indonesian, *Kinyarwanda, *Kirundi, *Kyrgyz, *Nepali, *Pashto , *Persian ,Portuguese for Brazil ,Russian, *Sinhalese, *Somali, Spanish for Latin America, *Swahili , *Tamil ,Turkish ,Ukrainian, *Urdu , *Uzbek and Vietnamese plus TV services in Arabic and Persian. (* for main service).
I'm guessing when you say that "the World Service is a shadow of its former self" you're judging this by the output of the English Language for Europe?
| link to this comment |
MikeB: 'if Sky and Virgin can do it, why not the BBC?' is also done whilst forgetting the BSkyB burned though losses of £2.479 billion [1] from the launch of Sky Digital 1998-2002, and they made no profit to 2007, and a loss again in 2008.
[1] BSkyB - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| link to this comment |
Lambo: it's is possible that some devices are not scanning for the transmission mode QSPK 8K 3/4
8.0Mb/s DVB-T MPEG2 but it's been in the Blue Book for many a year, perhaps the devices can do a manual scan... Can't think of any boxes I have seen that present QSPK as an option though.
| link to this comment |
Thursday 3 April 2014 4:45PM
It's also worth noting that Sky's encryption system, the one supplied by NDS, has a "return path", in that the box uses an 0800 number to "call home" overnight.
This has made the system very secure and kept fraud almost non-existent.
However it does mean that you are required (for the first 12 months) to have your Sky box connected to a phone line.
The system used by ONdigital (aka ITV Digital) was hacked before the boxes were shipped out, by comparison. It's not much of a subscription system if it can easily be broken.
Today, you could probably scrap the viewing cards and use the Internet for authorization and security. But does EVERY DTT home have the internet?