According to the latest reports from foreign technology media Torrent Freak, Sony has recently submitted a new technology patent [PDF] that prevents smart TVs and streaming devices from running piracy-related applications.
Sony has long advocated fighting piracy, but previously the scope was mainly in the PlayStation game console, music and video areas. The latest patent suggests that Sony plans to deploy anti-piracy measures in smart TVs as well.
Sony’s patent describes a system-level “monitoring” application that is integrated into the Sony TV system. The application contains a blacklist of known pirated network resources (such as URLs and IP addresses), and once a third-party application accesses the above-blacklisted resources it will actively block them from running, or reduce the playback resolution of the video, or irregularly pause the video playback so that users give up playing pirated content.
This is currently a Sony patent, so it’s impossible to tell if Sony’s smart TV devices will deploy this anti-piracy measure. The implementation of the system may have another problem: whether this monitoring system will take up a lot of system resources, affecting the experience of Android smart TVs.
