IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - May 2018 - 110

Market-Based Analyses

Market-Based Values
By David Alan Grier

he IEEE Consumer Electronics
Society is providing needed
attention to cybersecurity. Cybersecurity has become the fastestgrowing sector within the information
and computer industries and will likely
continue that distinction for the near
future. Yet, in considering the role of
cybersecurity, we risk thinking about
the subject too narrowly. We concentrate on the privacy of consumers or the
rights of the people who operate our
products and forget that security is one
of the fundamental elements of engineering and technical businesses.
In pursuing security, an organization
not only needs "to safeguard property
and persons against theft, fire and flood,"
wrote management pioneer Henri Fayol,
but also to ward off "all social disturbances liable to endanger the progress
and even the life of the business." Fayol
was a French mining engineer who
worked during the last decades of the
19th century and the first of the 20th.
His book, Administration Industrelle et
Général, is generally considered to be
the foundation of modern organizational
management. In it, he identified security
as one of the seven activities of management. "It is the master's eye," he wrote,
"the watch-dog of the one-man business," or even "the police or army in the
case of the State."
At best, security was a hidden concern for the first engineers of consumer
electronics. A quick review of the early
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCE.2018.2797622
Date of publication: 10 April 2018

110 IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine

may 2018

issues of IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics identifies only one
article that explicitly deals with security.
In the process, that search also reminds
us that the organization currently known
as the IEEE Consumer Electronics Society was originally the Institute of Radio
Engineers Professional Group on Broadcast and Television Receivers, an identity that the group retained through the
early 1980s. That one article, however,
shows how those engineers were working with issues of security that dealt not
only with individual consumers, or even
with individual businesses, but with the
needs of an entire industry.
The article, "Design of Video Security Systems for Pay-TV" [1], was published in 1964. It dealt with a technical
problem that had bedeviled the television industry: how to deliver premium
content in a way that would generate an
extra revenue stream. The industry had
been interested in this idea since its
inception in the late 1940s. By charging
for certain programs, television networks would be able to develop audiences that were not large enough to be
of interest to the primary source of revenue, which was advertisers who wished
to reach a mass market.
Video security, which was also known
by the name scrambling, was only a
minor part of the television industry for
the next 20 years. The major networks
were getting sufficient income from
mass-market advertising and didn't need
to develop the technologies to reach
smaller audiences. Scrambling become
important only when one segment of the

industry, the cable television networks,
felt that it needed scrambling to secure
its position and grow.
Cable networks began in the early
1950s as community antennas. They
were cooperative systems, a well-placed
antenna that would receive distant television signals for isolated towns and
rural areas. The United States had 400
of them in 1955, 1,570 a decade later,
and 3,506 in 1975. By the early 1970s,
investors recognized that these systems
might have the ability to compete with
the traditional broadcast networks if
they could offer services that were not
available from open-air transmitters.
While some of these services focused
on local programming and tried to
encourage local production facilities,
most turned to the new premium channels, such as HBO (founded in 1972),
ESPN (1979), and CNN (1980).
Unlike the traditional networks, the
new premium channels distributed their
content through communications satellites. Through most of the 1970s, this
distribution channel was secure because
few people owned satellite receivers.
These receivers required an expensive
dish antenna and a license to operate that
antenna. In 1979, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission announced
that it would no longer require a license
for satellite dishes. At that point, the
dishes became a consumer item. Individuals could purchase them and view premium content without subscribing to a
cable service.
From the start, the cable operators
identified satellite dishes as an existential

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - May 2018