[BC] DRE: Make any sense to Beancounters?

[Mark Humphrey]

I was curious about DRE's plans to offer encryption,
because I see it as a secure solution to the piracy
problems that have affected SCA "tenants" in the past.

About 20 years ago, I leased a conventional 92 KHz
non-comm SCA in Philadelphia to an ethnic broadcaster,
who was offering portable SCA receivers on the "honor
system" for around $20/month.  He started out doing
quite well and signing a lot of subscribers -- in
fact, when I would stop for diner food in South
Jersey, I would usually hear his "station" playing in
the kitchen.  

But several years later, he was out of business. 
Three problems:  1)  His business model relied on
advertising  as well as a subscription fee, 2) Many of
his longtime listeners figured out they didn't have to
send him a check every month to keep the programming
coming, and  3) A grey market for SCA receivers had
developed in this area, so once those hit the streets,
he couldn't attract new paid subscribers.  

Shortly before he went under, in desperation, he asked
me to try and help him develop a "scrambling" system. 
With an analog signal and such low bandwidth, about
the only thing we could think of was frequency
inversion, but that's not very secure, nor easily
addressable.  Besides, he would have had to send new
receivers out to all of the legitimate subscribers
before turning on the encryption.

Of course, with a digital system, scrambling is a
piece of cake.  It should be interesting to see how
this develops.

Does anyone know how DRE's modulation scheme differs
from the IBOC system that was tested on WCRB several
years ago?  Wasn't that a MITRE project?

Mark



--- WFIFeng at aol.com wrote:
>
> 
> DRE will be ideal for specialized "narrocasting" and
> will actually provide 
> the stations using it with a revenue *stream*
> instead of a revenue *drain*!! 
> Come on, beancounters... doesn't it make a whole lot
> *more* sense to pay $9,000 
> *once* for the box, then start *collecting* every
> month from the users of those 
> additional audio services? Bottom-line thinking,
> here!
>


		
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