MagneticMediaFed

This could get complicated, so lets break it down into pieces:1) Cablevision, the Long Island, New York based cable provider and ruiner of major market basketball teams, is trying to roll-out an innovation for its digital cable subscribers. The new service is called Remote Access DVR. It gives the customer the ability to record scheduled programming, pause live TV, fast-forward through commercials and all the rest of it, but unlike the standard-issued DVR box (which is expensive for the company to provide and maintain), the remote access service would record all of the programming at a centralized server accessible to the customer through a standard digital cable box.

OK. Cool. That sounds like something I might be interested in. How do I get one? (More after the break…)

2) Shortly after Cablevision made this announcement it was promptly sued by several Hollywood film and television studios. Their reasoning was that the recording of their content “would have amounted to an additional broadcast of their programs, something for which they haven’t given permission” (AP QUOTE) and thus Cablevision would be in violation of their copyrights. Cablevision maintains that the user is still in control of the content and that this service doesn’t give them any privileges they wouldn’t all ready have with a standard DVR box.

I don’t get it. How is this any different just having the box in my home?

3) The U.S. Court of Appeals ruled against Cablevision last month causing the company to appeal. Cablevision says the court misapplied copyright laws. According to the landmark Betamax case of 1984, people are given the right to record and playback television programming for their own personal use.

Wow, it sounds like Hollywood is just a bunch of whiny control freaks who don’t want their viewers to have the upper hand.

4) Here’s where you have to start reading between the lines. If Cablevision offers this service from a centralized location, it’s hard to imagine that they’d actually record exactly what their customers wanted to record. Instead, it seems logical to assume Cablevision will simply record everything on every one of its channels and save the content to a massive server system. If a specific program is “recorded” by a subscriber, the master program will be available for their access - basically the same way the current On-Demand system works, only on a greater scale.

This more or less amounts to a scenario where a cable provider is offering all of its content to its subscribers in a form that lets them easily skip commercials.

Yeah, but what’s the difference?

5) There is no difference! (I would argue, however, that the ease of navigating a DVR in your home versus a DVR at a remote location, would be reason enough to stick with the box.) What this basically all comes down to is what I like to believe to be a Battle for Endor between content creators and content distributors. It’s a face off that has been coming to a head for years and it appears like a battle royale is immanent.

Major media companies have been doing a pretty good job of squashing distribution innovation for the past five years. First Napster, then DRM, then Viacom’s billion dollar YouTube lawsuit, but the target has always been geared at the independent start-up (Apple launched the iTunes store as a way to play by the rules in the wake of Napster, but concessions were made - Apple makes one or two cents for every song sold, the rest of the money goes to the label and the artist). This Cablevision decision is one of the first times a major distribution company has attempted to dramatically change the way the system works (even if that change is purely symantic) since the ‘84 Betamax decision.

Oh yeah? So where do I grab my sword?

6) Theoretically one of these sides will win, and it will completely change the media landscape. In one scenario Hollywood gets its way and every piece of media is distributed under an enormous synergistic monolith complete with its own action figures and breakfast cereals. In the other scenario Hollywood eventually buckles to those producing the technologies that the users want and we all live together in lush, fiber-optic prairies freely exchanging our media from all of our favorite devices while picking daisies.

Of course there’s also the chance that Hollywood will continue to tighten its grip on its content as technology companies continue to develop more elaborate ways to pry that content free of its restrictions: so we all lose.

I think I’m going to go read a book.

Or

Read more about Cablevisions attempt to roll-out remote access DVR via MediaWeek

This entry was posted on Friday, April 13th, 2007 at 1:54 pm and is filed under Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.