I just had a stimulating conversation with Howard Silverman, secretary of the Secure Video Processor Alliance, and Broadband Communication Group's Brian Sprague, vice president of marketing for Set-Top Boxes and DTV, whose company is a founding member of the alliance.

The SVP Alliance is "an industry association dedicated to the adoption of SVP content-protection technology in digital home networks and portable devices." To put that another way, the alliance is trying to get video content distribution networks and manufacturers of video playback devices to use the SVP Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology to prevent piracy.

The SVP DRM system is based in a chip on the viewing device and looks at datastreams to see if they are SVP protected and whether the associated rights allow the video to be shown on that display. If the content is authorized it is decrypted on the fly and voilà!

The system is based on some kind of digital certificate system, with every SVP chip having a unique ID and certificate against which specific content is authorized for a specific time period. Silverman told me the extra electronics adds little to the display device's cost.

The argument for using SVP is that video piracy costs the industry money. The alliance references the Motion Picture Association of America's claim of $61 billion of lost revenue in 2005. This is, of course, a hugely debatable number and presupposes that without piracy that revenue would actually be acquired, but that's a topic for another column.

On the face of it, the SVP proposition sounds reasonable: A low-cost embedded hardware solution that provides transparent, robust content protection. Unfortunately the reality will not be quite as good.

What the SVP Alliance is really claiming is it will have a God chip, a chip so sophisticated and powerful that it can't be hacked, won't have significant bugs and will do its job cheaply and, in effect, perfectly.

The biggest problem is that a God chip is not possible. If a human mind can build it, a human mind can defeat it. For this reason it is a certainty that, should the SVP system become ubiquitous in consumer electronics, lots of really clever people will eventually figure out how to defeat it. Just consider that Apple's iTunes 7 DRM was hacked exactly eight hours after it was announced!