The HDCP magic inside Bunnie's NeTV

This is an amazing technical accomplishment. But it also has huge ramifications for the TV industry and licensing.

Currently, all HDCP chips are licensed from a central agency (mostly Intel). It has "robustness rules" about how and where the chips can be used, otherwise you don't get a license. These rules are intended to prevent people from building HDCP strippers (HDCP in, plaintext out) but also to make it harder to inadvertently leak plaintext.

For a long time, I believe it was hard to get a license for a device that used a general-purpose processor. But the Logitech Revue and similar devices basically have two HDMI ports and a CPU in between. So those rules may be changing.

The NeTV is different. It's a slow CPU and FPGA in an ultra-cheap design. It only does encryption to insert its overlay into the stream, it doesn't do decryption. But it uses the HDCP master key to do so, which would probably not be ok with the HDCP corporations.

This has interesting questions for the DMCA and content protection in general. Will this approach be allowed? If not, on what grounds would someone file suit? Would it be purely anti-competitive, an attempt to prevent a small company from playing in the big leagues?

I'm now watching intently to see what happens next. Incidentally, Bunnie is speaking about this at Maker Faire and Open Hardware Summit tomorrow through this weekend.