Wholly Smoke Batman - There's a conspriracy!!!

Hinko - the ICT flag is nothing new. It does/will apply to HD broadcasts worldwide. I believe Sky currently use this on their content now to prevent output of a HD signal over component on certain HD channels.

The HDCP standard is designed to enforce this protection - nothing more, nothing less. It provides no other good the consumer, and in many cases turns otherwise reasonable equipment into lemons as you have found out.

The ability to protect the path (via HDMI or via a protected Digital source) has been in Bluray from day one. I believe this was an initiative of Sony, along with regional encoding. Many titles have chosen not to use it so far, but it will get turned on. HDCP was also used in HD-DVD.

Much of this stuff has been documented for years now. There is nothing new, hidden or otherwise. The media companies have been very public in their desire to protect their content. They have spent billions of dollars with DRM companies to enforce their rights.

The consumer in this case is comes a distant second to the desire of the media content companies to protect their content using DRM Tools, ICT flags, DCP on Bluray etc etc etc. There is nothing new here, and has been happening for years.

If you desire to use certified devices to view HD content, such as Freeview certified decoders and PVR, and or MySky and MySky HDi, these protection mechanisms will exist, and you will need to learn to live with them. Remembering you choose to purchase their equipment. When you watch a DVD or Bluray, you agree to abiding by the usage rights that go with it.

Broadcasters will have the ability to time limit things such as recordings to say 48 hours or 1 month, or whatever they choose. If you use these devices get used to it. You will also need to use equipment which supports these standards ie HDMI at a minimum.

On the flip side, the billions of dollars spent on content protection (usually with trumpeted media releases saying how many billions of dollards they have spent on them, and how good they are) to limit the functionality of these devices is balanced by the zero dollards spent by snotty nosed geeks who never see the light of day, eating 5000 pizzas a year, but destroy these protection mechanisms days after they are released by the content providers. They then proceed to write software for normal people who can then use these to ignore all of the above, and continue to watch TV, Movies and record stuff like they always have.