What’s cool about DVRs like TiVo? That you can automatically grab any shows you want from TV, hold onto them, watch them at your convenience, watch them again, and completely control, from a time perspective, what you do with TV content.
The big media companies, of course, hate it, because it means that they think they therefore lose that much control. So now they are starting to impose restrictions on what TiVo and others can do with their copyrighted material.
I recently got a sample of Tivo DRM, accidentally I suspect. Recently a Simpson’s rerun recorded with a red-flag next to it (an icon I’ve never seen before). When I selected the episode, I got a message to the effect that “the copyright holder prohibited saving the episode past date mm/dd”. I also noted that this episode could not be copied using Tivo To-go (but ironically it could be “saved to tape” ? I guess that is the analog hole).
I can understand (though rail against) restricting folks from copying the materials for their own future use. But putting in restrictions indicating that the recorded show will “expire” within a certain date?
Screw. You.
I may not watch a show for weeks after recording. I may wait until I can sit down and watch several episodes at once. I may love a show and want to save it so that Margie can watch it, or so that friends and I can watch it in a few weeks.
You want to tell me that I can’t do that?
Imagine someone building a “self destruct” mechanism into your VCR tapes, a la Mission: Impossible. Imagine self-destucting DVDs — oh, wait, we’ve had that and it’s failed miserably.
The media companies are so terrified of losing control of their works that they are willing, even eager, to cripple DVRs, make them far less valuable of a proposition, make them as regulated and restricted as DRM-heavy MP3 players. And they’ll kill the industry — willingly — not realizing that they’ll kill all the DVR-based enthusiasm and market they’ve just started building.
Content does not become popular, or profitable, by keeping it locked away and doled out in tiny, controlled doses. I’m not saying anything like “content wants to be free,” but content wants to be freely distributed, and amount of money that folks are then willing to spend on that content, or on still more content, increases far more than a locked-down, gate-kept, Soviet Bloc-style product will ever achieve.
If TiVo goes ahead with this OS, they’ll drive away a lot of their loyal fanbase. And TiVo cannot afford that. Nor, frankly, can the companies who are, with short-sighted malice aforethought, killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.
I seem to recall an interview with somebody at Sony, on the hardware side. IIRC, the hardware side of the business generated something like 80-90% of the profits. The “software” side (music, movies, etc.) the rest.
Guess which side of the corporation came up with all the stuff that made me give up on various Sony portable players?
I had the Sony “Net Discman”. I had to “check out” songs (my CD’s!). I had to “check in” the songs. If I checked out a song more than three times without checking it in, it blocked me.
Now, there was a bug in the system which occasionally did not allow you to check in a song, so you had to erase it from the disc to use the disc again. Well, you get the picture. When that player died, I did not replace it. I use my non-DRM MP3 application on my PalmOS PDA instead. They are my CD’s, I should be able to listen to them no matter where without jumping through hoops.
I don’t think TiVo has much to worry about. The average person isn’t going to dump TiVo over this, and if they do, where do they go? This is part of the standard MacroVision license, which pretty much every VCR, DVD Recorder, and DVR supports. ReplayTV supported these restrictions before TiVo, as do other DVRs. There have been reports of it showing up on cable company DVRs, for example.
Sure, geeks can build MythTV and FreeVo boxes, but the average end user is going to need something off-the-shelf, and that will almost certainly have MacroVision. MacroVision is so pervasive it is almost impossible to avoid in consumer video recording products.
Actually from what I’ve seen there are plenty of TiVo fans who will dump their boxes should this become more commonplace. Knowing this was coming and the fact that TiVo requires a monthly subscription on top of paying for the hardware are part of what’s kept me from purchasing one. Though I did use my cable company’s set top box with a DVR built into it for awhile.
The thing that cracks me up is that so many of the network execs are moaning and complaining about the decline in TV viewer ship, particularly by males 18-34. Then they turn around and cripple a device that would actually promote more TV viewing by giving the audience control over when they see a program. For someone like me that means I’ll watch even less TV than I do now.
What Les said.
As far as the MacroVision license — as I said, I can’t complain too much about actual copying restriction. I may think it silly that I can’t save DVRed shows to tape to watch later (it’s not like it’s really going to stop me from buying the DVD if it’s something I actually like, and it may actually let me share the show with others who might watch/buy the DVD), but I’m willing to cede that limitation.
But restricting the time period in which I can watch something. Duh. That’s a huge part of the reason I bought/rented the DVR in the first place.
I do agree that the average Joe Blogg won’t be able to bypass it, but I think it will seriously impact the desirability of such devices, and thus hurt sales. If people want to be forced to watch a show in a given time frame, they’ll watch the freakin’ show. Otherwise, once it’s recorded, leave it alone (or let the limitation of the device’s hard drive force the restriction).
I can only speak for myself, but if this restriction was put into place you bet your ass I’d dump TiVO like a hot rock. As you said, being able to watch something on my own time schedule is the whole POINT. I mean we have movies we taped 3 months ago sitting on our unit because we haven’t felt like/gotten around to watching them yet.
Precisely.
Info on BoingBoing for some alternative systems.
I will be watching Comcast’s DVR service very carefully to see if this sort of thing creeps in.
Forget ‘creeping in’ – the same restrictions are already in the cable company DVRs. Probably in most commercial DVRs by now, MacroVision is pervasive. As for the TiVo alternatives, some of them support DVD. If they’d doing that legally, they have a DVD Forum license. If they have that license they must support CSS, and that requires licensing MacroVision and adhering to that license in the product. At least some of the PC software based DVR systems also support MacroVision.
It is widespread, and not something the vendors generally make clear. It is just in there, and you don’t know it until you trip over it. That’s kind of the idea – MacroVision is supposed to be transparent to nigh every user.
By “creeping in,” I mean discovering that there’s content recorded on my Comcast DVR with the sort of expiration restrictions that are discussed above. I find that unacceptable.
TiVo now claims that it was “noise” in the signal, and these restrictions should only ever apply to Pay-per-View and “video on demand” services. Maybe. That’s the plan at least. Maybe.
Okay, if you are buying/paying for one-time viewing of content, I can see the logical (if still irksome) rationale for being able to limit how many times it can be viewed. But the reassurance that it will “probably” never be applied to regular TV shows still rings a bit hollow.
I hope this little contretemps indicates to TiVo (and MacroVision and the content providers) what sorts of boundaries folks are sensitive to.