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September 04, 2002

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Amendment 3 available from ATSC

The technical standard for the broadcast flag itself (which defines what the broadcast flag is and how it may be placed into a broadcast) is available from ATSC. The broadcast flag is called the "redistribution control descriptor" (descriptor 0xAA) by ATSC, and is defined in Amendment 3 to A/65A: Program and System Information Protocol for Terrestrial Broadcast and Cable (Revision A) (commonly known as "A/65" or "PSIP").

Amendment 3, adopted by ATSC in April of this year, can be found in the document linked above, beginning on p. 142. Readers may observe that the descriptor, by itself, doesn't do anything; it's defined to mean that "technological control of consumer redistribution is signaled", but the ATSC standards do not require any particular response to its presence.

Requiring devices to detect and respond to this flag in a particular way is the role of the Compliance and Robustness Rules discussed within the BPDG. Currently, manufacturers are producing legal (and ATSC standards-compliant) devices which do not respond to the flag at all.

Posted by Seth Schoen at 05:29 PM