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TiVo, ReplayTV Agree to Limits
Grump writes "This story reports that 'The makers of TiVo and ReplayTV digital video recorders have agreed to limit how long consumers can keep pay-for-view movies stored on future versions of the VCR-like devices.' Is this fair, or erosion of more fair-use rights?"
As I recall in the recent past, a well-known seller tried to limit viewing of movies by introducing the Divx technology whereby, the machine would connect to a server to get a key to view. Now if Replay or Tivo try this then there will be a backlash from the consumer. What would be ironic is if one of these PVR manufactures goes bully up than I suspect that the software community will pickup the fragments and produce code to do whatever the original community want.
On a side note, I watch a video program on my PVR from PBS that was for educational instructional use and it had a disclaimer at the beginning stating that copies could be used up until 2006 or so. I don't have any intent on keeping the program that long but why should I depend on a 3 party source to keep and maintain material. A distributed system where PVR owners share programs is just about to become a rally by certain. This peeves me - the thing that manufactures/groups worry about the most is usually good for them and the consumer.
To sum the two paragraphs together: the video material should be in an inter-dispersed local (PVRs) and not limited because of popularity (Fair use). In fact the material should only survive if it is popular enough to be wanted/distributed from enough people wanting to exchange the information - If no one wants it then it would disappear.
These two competitors have agreed on a completely arbitrary limit for recording PPV shows. Why? Think about it: the PVR market is growing. Rather than focusing on new features for the consumer (ie: "We offer 1.5 times the PPV time-limit over our competitor.") they've come to an agreement that is good for no one but themselves. There's no way in hell that they just decided to do this, the entire agreement has the fetid stink of collusion.
Take control, this is yet another reason to dump TV entirely and download what you want to watch.
Sorry, it's Friday, I'm in RantMode and I have First Damn Post.
Trolling is a art,
Enjoy!
DVD Ripping, Divx, VCD, SVCD under Linux
That's crap!
Not that the story is wrong, but the idea is bullshit.
I have a TiVo and I upgraded it with a 140Gb drive, so I get over 100hrs of storage. I use it in exactly the way they should want someone to. I'm not a couch potato, I work for a living. There are shows I like to watch, but I usually don't have time to just sit down at watch when they're on. I usually start watching television around 2am. For years, this meant I watched crap. Now that I have a TiVo, I can watch good shows.
We'll use their example of '6 feet under'. I may not get a chance to watch it til a week later. Should I miss the episode because they decided to set an arbitrary limit to how long I can keep it stored? What if I'm out of town for work for a week? Can't I come home, and catch up on the episodes that I missed. Yes, this has happened more than once, and it's *REALLY* nice that I can do it.
I haven't seen any black market shops selling '6 feet under' episodes recorded with TiVo.
How about PPV movies? My girlfriend has watched movies, and recorded them (on the TiVo). I may sit down a week or two later, and watch that movie. Fair use. The household paid for it. Or more like, *I* paid for it. If we had been home at the same time, we would have watched together. So if this goes through, now she'll see the movie or show, and I'll be out of luck?
They're not afraid of piracy, they're looking at possible revenue that they're missing. They could possibly get an extra PPV viewing fee because I would possibly buy it twice. Well, that's wrong, I wouldn't. I won't pay twice, I just won't watch it til it comes out on HBO and I happen to be sitting there.
As for '6 feet under', I actually was into that show in the first few seasons. I didn't have a TiVo, but my schedule permitted me to be at home to watch it. At the time, I didn't own a TiVo. My work schedule changed, and I missed several episodes, and was lost about the story line when I tried to start watching again. If I had a TiVo then, I could have spent some time catching up on old episodes, and still been interested in the series. Now that's a show I simply don't watch. It's a waste of their broadcasting time, because I don't know what's happened previously.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
So I guess I better keep that VHS a little longer... feh....
Is this fair, or erosion of more fair-use rights?
Sounds more like collusion to me.
That's fine. I'll just start storing them on my hard drive. That, or I'll quit ordering Pay-Per-view altogether and just sign up for Netflix so I can burn DVD-R copies like everyone else.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
And if I was a conspiracy theorist, I'd say that the two companies are both trying to make their restriction mechanisms as easily-breakable as possible. Think about it - if you had to choose between a TiVo and ReplayTV device, and a crack was only available (or at least only easily installed) for the TiVo, which one would you buy?
This space intentionally left blank.
First, can you still pull that content off your Tivo/ReplayTV and put it on something else? Yes.
Second, is the time limit as long/longer than a rental? I tend to look at this service as a replacement for going to my neighborhood video rental store. Is the quality, price, rental time limit, etc. comparable? If so, and it removes the hassle of driving out to the store, plus finding a movie that's actually in stock, then it sounds like a great deal to me.
What fair use rights are being eroded when you rent a movie for the night and return it the next day?
Part of the agreement when you buy a PPV movie is that you have a limited window in which to watch it. You didn't buy the right to watch it whenever you want, do why do you demand it anyway? If you don't want to watch it right then, don't buy it right then. This is akin to renting a movie from Blockbuster, returning it 3 weeks late and then demanding no late fees because you didn't watch it until the night before.
There is a difference between "insightful" and "inciteful" other than spelling.
I haven't seen a single advantage to PPV. The movies that I see available on DirecTV have already been out in the movie store for over a month (ie Starsky and Hutch). I pay less at the video store and I get to keep the movie for 5 days...
So what advantage does a $4.00 movie via PPV (plus additional fees that they might charge) have?
Let me know when I can purchase DVDs over my Tivo and have a tangible piece of media to store it for life that doesn't take up my TV recording space and I'll be interested. Until then it's just another Divx knockoff that's going to die because no one cares.
Their argument for this is bogus. If they think pay-per-view is cutting into the videotape rentals that they so bitterly opposed (you should check out the problems blockbuster had when they first started up), then they should charge more for pay-per-view. It seems like everytime a technological advance comes along, the MPAA has to be dragged kicking and screaming....into a big pile of money. I wish they would stop their whining.
If they really want to get serious about this, it's obvious that they should be working on limiting how long people are allowed to remember the intellectual property they've consumed, much less how long they are allowed to keep it available.
I know that if I were still in the driver's seat, I would be ordering up plans on how to reliably blank the memories of the stinking mass of sheeple that suck the generous teat of mass media. Not only would it allow us to sell the same thing over and over, none of you bastards would even remember enough to care about 'fair use' and all that malarky. sheesh.
signed,
Ted Turner
It's perfectly fair. I just won't buy from them.
Feel free to continue to practice your Fair Use Rights by using DVArchive (or whatever equivalents are out for TiVo. Or buy some OTHER company's PVR. Or find out how to hack the feature back into the units. Or build a homebrew PVR using Freevo, Myth, Sage, etc.
Consumers still have a ton of options. This is just two corporations making a dumb decision--nothing to see!
I can't see this argument working well with the current crop of TiVo subscribers, who are used to retaining content for as long as they'd like. With the current TiVo boxes, you can even record off DVD (i.e. rentals) to your TiVo, and watch them as much as you'd like, since the recorder recognizes the Macrovision on the way in, and re-establishes it on output (so you couldn't make a VHS dub of the recorded DVD). I know of quite a few TiVo users that do this, and I can't see them liking losing this functionality. I know I'd be unhappy with this restriction, losing the content in as little as 24 hours.
Copies of Max Headroom, Alf cartoons, Animaniacs, coverage of Gulf War, etc. all will go when the VHS tapes they are on finally decay.
You say that like it's a bad thing. Sounds like a feature to me.
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
Instead of, say, limiting the length of time it can be stored, why don't they make it so that (1) once play has started, it must be completed within 48 hours, and (2) once it's finished playing, the file erases itself.
Let the TiVo store unplayed content for an infinite length of time -- but put strict limits on it once it starts to be *used(
For the love of anything that's holy, stop saying boxen..
it is intended to allay the piracy and business concerns that prevent the studios from releasing films to cable pay-per-view services on the same day they appear on DVD. Such issues also have made premium cable networks reluctant to offer on-demand services that would allow subscribers to watch any episode of, say, ``Six Feet Under'' they choose, at any time.
What piracy concerns? DVDs are available for download the second they hit store shelves (or days before as is often the case). Having some movie on a Tivo isn't going to increase the level of piracy.
"Business concerns" my ass.
"The market alone cannot provide sufficient constraints on corporation's penchant to cause harm." -- Joel Bakan
Its their content. Its their business how they license that content to you.
Although it pisses me off as much as anyone else on here that these content companies want "do not record", "only play until xxx", and "do not copy" type flags on their content, I do believe they've got every right to do that since the material belongs to them.
If you don't like it, don't watch it. There's lots of far higher quality movies, programs and music out there from people who aren't as fixated on keeping strict controls.
If the majority of people care, then they will change or go out of business. But the fact is, most people don't care. They're still going to watch "6 Feet Under"...
"How to permanently keep your recorded data"
mythtv-suite
And this is on the precompiled binaries page! How the heck will any non-Linux-geek figure this out?
Someone really needs to compile a MythTV LiveCD (or whatever) that you can just install and run on a PC with suitable video hardware. Having to figure out all this Linux mumbo-jumbo, or worse, compile it yourself, is a recipe for saying "screw it" and going back to TiVo, restrictions or no.
sulli
RTFJ.
Never fear, every episode of Max Headroom but one (and it's coming) is available for download from the Digital Archive Project.
I think perhaps television companies are failing to see the true positives and negatives of these systems. Their true problem is not that people will turn their TIVO into a movie library (hence filling it to the point where they won't have any more space), but that they will skip commercials. The most likely response to this, besides desperate legislation, is to build more and more advertising into the shows themselves. Whether this is a good or bad scenerio, I don't know. It means less time wasted with commercials, but content becoming much more controlled.
The positives of these systems is there is no longer a 'prime time'. Once these systems are wide spread, you can schedule shows at any time, including the middle of the night, and people who want to watch them can.
As for Tivo and Replays "solution" here, well, not being able to keep pay-per-view stuff forever isn't so bad, though I'll stick with my MythTV box which I have total control over. The bad part of this is that this isn't likely to be the only restriction but the start of many restrictions which will further erode the usefulness of these systems, and even worse, the coming of new laws that would likely have made systems like Tivo illegal in the first place if they came a little earlier.
Well, the Tivo has already been hacked. So, just get your movie from Netflix...then, burn it directly off onto DVD. This would all be digital too wouldn't it?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Remember, the the original Sony Betamax decision at the Supreme Court didn't say that we were allowed to use VCRs to permanantly archive anything. It said that we had the right to time-shift content we obtained from TV broadcasters.
Therefore, a TiVo really doesn't have the legally established right to have a "Save Until I Delete" feature. Current TiVo devices offer that "green ball" as a keep-forever setting, but that's really in the gray area that we've never seen any court rulings about how legal that is.
So, another chip off the "fair use" tree has fallen away from us, but this wasn't really one that was well established to begin with. At least this is also a dent in the "broadcast flag" that might have marked PPV movies as being in a no-DVR-zone...
Hollywood's view on copyright is pretty unrealistic in my opinion.
When a film is released in cinemas, a large degree of copyright control can be expected by the copyright owner. They can effectivly control the distrobution and showing of the film.
When the film is released on video and DVD, a large degree of copyright control is lost to the holder. They can only loosly control the distrobution and showing of the film. People can buy films and view them whereever they please, and give the DVD to whoever they please. Maybe even copy.
However when a copyright holder makes the decision to broadcast a film to millions of people, over the airwaves, potentially to every human in the contry, and in future perhaps the world, it is fair to say they have abandoned all pretence to copyright control. They have in effect duplicated the film about as many times as it can be duplicated, almost infinitly, and in so doing have made a laughing stock of their grounds of complete control over their copyright.
If you want to use your copyright to broadcast your film all over the airwaves, fine. Just don't expect to keep the same control over it as you did the day before. If you blast your movie into my box, I've got it and possession is nine tenths of the law mate.
It's like an author emailing his book to every inbox on the globe and then complaining when people start printing it out or reading it on their PDAs. Rubbish.
Hollywood has lost its monopoly on the reproduction of media content. Tought luck. Evolve or die, dinasaurs. Don't drag more innovative compnaies like TiVo down with you. the situation in the UK is a little different. Sky+ actually encourages viewers to record TV content. Maybe it's the lack of a Hollywood there?
May the Maths Be with you!
Uhh have you used any of those so-called DVRs? They aren't even remotely close to a Tivo. I understand from a business perspective Tivo is F'ed, but I would never in a million years pay my cable company 5 bucks a month just to save 7 bucks a month over Tivo's cost to get the incomparably worse DVR service.
Previous court rulings have allowed for infinite, private use of recorded things like Pay-Per-View events/movies.
If you want it *THAT* bad, then go buy yourself a goddamned VCR/DVD-R and dump it to that. The ones who like to hack theirs, send it to PC and save it there or something.
Inspite of having mammoth HDs andsuch, do you *really* want a huge 2+ hour file recorded at hgh quality just sitting on it for a long period of time? Do you lug your TiVo over to friends' places to do a movie night?
Better yet, as someone else suggested, go out and pay thr $20 or so an buy the DVD so you get a better copy, the special features, and a copy you can use anywhere.
Anonymous Cowards generally receive no replies because you're a coward and I'm a bitch
'Sorry to be a contrarian to the "Intellectual Property Is An Oxymoron" crowd, but...
In this particular instance, I agree with what they're doing - you paid a certain price to watch a movie for a certain period of time. If you want to record it, go buy a copy and record a backup for your own personal use (TM).
Mark
They control the access codes and law. We control our wallet. If we were as digilent over the wallet as they are over their control and laws, we would see our viewpoints taken more seriously.
But, as studied in microeconomics, the reason the big guys get away with it is the "little people" are disorganized and do not provide a unified front as large organizations do. The effort to organize is far greater to the individual than the value of the benefits lost. So the big guys just take. And get off scot-free.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
This seems to me like a terrible business decision made short-sighted people who haven't done the proper research into consumer habits... Restrictions like this may appear to increase copyright-holder's revenue, and perhaps even do so in the very short-term, but in the long-term these kinds of restrictions REDUCE the revenue they make.
...Is this really that complicated to understand? By relaxing the rules, they've convinced me to SPEND MORE MONEY.
Or, to say it another way, less restrictive copy controls actually INCREASE the amount of money made on a property, so long as the expense is primarily discretionary.
Remember, I can entertain myself in many other ways aside from TV/Movie -- and so the convienence factor is a primary purchasing decision. If the _perceived_ value of the purchase is low: because of price, annoying rules, etc -- then I will go and spend my money somewhere else.
PPV is a perfect example of this... Up until last year, I was _never_ interested in PPV: why spend as much money as a rental, and not be able to pause for the bathroom, get interrupted, whatever. I occasionally rented movies: but renting is a pain, I have to go to the store, then I have to remember to return it (which I often don't) etc. As a result, I only rented movies when I was ready to have "a movie night" --and as a result rented movies once a month or less: 2 movie rentals/month.
Last year, I got the DirecTivo. DirecTivo with PPV is great: Every once in a while I go onto the PPV lists and pick a few movies I might want to watch, the Tivo records them and they're waiting. I find that I watch a lot more good movies this way: since anytime I want to chill for an hour I can just pop on a good movie (or the end of one I was interrupted watching). Using PPV like this, I buy probably 5-6 movies a month.
What's the downside to the movie studios here? The average person does not watch even a purchased DVD more than once or twice -- does the movie industry really think I'm gonna keep it stored on my Tivo for 2 years and watch it so many times that I will stop buying other movies?
Oh well, I guess I'll just stop buying PPV when this happens -- just like Copy-Protected CDs and the various other inconvienent drm formats that i've ignored...
"The right we have here is to buy or not buy, that's about it."
that is woefully ignorant.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I've seen some very clever posts on this board about the applications of TiVo and ReplayTV to change the industry, some things I didn't even think of before.
The problem is, however, is that the bigger the industry, the less change is appreciated.
For example, someone said that with TiVo, prime time will go away and you can schedule your show any time and it will get picked up by one of these recorders. The problem with that is that then there is no longer a need for the executives who run prime time. Their niche is threatened. Plus without prime time pricing, advertising rates fall for those hours.
And then, if you can fast forward past commercials, rates fall even faster.
If you can't control the distribution of a movie, there is rarely a need for all the producers and execs responsible for filming and funding movies. The artist makes it, and then distributes it via their chosen medium. The pictures are high budget so they have to make sure money flows in a specific direction. Much of that money has to flow into the pockets of those execs.
I keep wanting to point out about failures in capitalism, until I realize that this isn't capitalism! Capitalism requires competition and, like so many industries in the US involving media and services, there is so little competition to actually be capitalism. We just conveniently forgot about that chapter Adam Smith wrote about when it comes to media.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
it is collusion! normally collusion has to do with prices (and sometimes sales territory) rather than features such as this.
But think of this like an economist: reducing features and charging the same price is essentially the same thing as raising the price (go with me on this one). If two companies agree to limit functionality and maintain their prices (or agree to similar prices, or even simply agree on price) then that really is price collusion.
Think about this: Ford and GM executives at one point never even spoke to each other for fear of collusion accusations!
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Lost Sheep to Shepard, you got your ears on?
Actually, I'll bet Porn is driving this.
The price of Porn on PPV is significantly higher than regular movies. According to some friends in the business, the entire PPV business model is based around porn. There's no way they can make a profit based on the random "Let the kids watch some movie they've probably already seen". They just have to offer non-adult programming to make it acceptable to the community.
Since many people are embarrased to buy Porn, even via mail order, they certainly won't go rent it at the local video store. So they use PPV.
By expiring it, they guarantee a revenue stream, compared to letting the viewer record a few dozen shows and repeatedly viewing them.
No mystery here. Move along.
1) Pay-per-view is just that, Pey PER View, PVRs were not concieved with the notion of allowing you to permanently archive TV/Movies - you don't rent a movie from blockbuster and expect to retain a copy of the movie when you go to return it, do you? VCRs weren't even designed with this in mind, hence the Betamax decision. 2) Along the lines of archiving video, the rulings which make TiVo and the like possible basically because it is for time-shifting, this is not the same as PERMANENT archiving. 3) TV stations make money by selling advertisement, they don't make money by paying for broadcast rights. This is their reason for skipping commercials plain and simple. Making information free costs money, are you going to pay for it?
what are your usage rights with a TiVO? what they want you to have. it's a locked technology with asterisks all over, licensed, and tightly bound. you have the right to watch something that they allow you to watch.
on a "purchased video," which really is a purchased piece of media with a little licensed artwork on the label and case and a licensed video production embedded in its code, you have a limited right of personal viewing without any rights for re-release or commercial or non-profit showing to groups. some laws appear to create the right to make a backup copy, and there has been some litigation over this. there is no explicit right to watch it over and over and over again in perpetuity, but an implicit right that as long as it holds up, you could watch the thing as often and as repetively as you personally want for personal enjoyment.
it looks like any other distribution method is trying to renege on the implicit right to review the work any time, any number of times.
so let the marketplace vote. the standard DVD and CD are just fine as they are for me, and if they do some sort of retro-fsckup in new players, I also have several 16mm projectors, and I will go back to a different analog technology if I have to make some sort of pissy personal point about how many times I can watch an old 16mm print bought off eBay or at a garage sale.
I personally think as the limited and locked parts of the story become clear, the limited and locked methods of distribution will crap out like DiVX-original (there is a digital stream out there called "divx" now, probably just to piss off the moneygrubbers at circuit city who were big into the "dies next month" project.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
It doesn't just cost your $4 to save it on your Tivo forever. It's $4 + % of Tivo capacity used * Total Tivo cost.
At some point, just buying the DVD is more economic.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
So long as I get to keep the PPV movies for "limited times" as defined by the Supreme Court "justices" that upheld the CTEA, I'm fine with it.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
If the memory erasing device featured in Men in Black was ever invented, I can see the MPAA standing outside every movie theater in America flashing the audience as they depart.
"Sorry, you have no rights to remember any portion of this movie. Your brain is in violation of international copyrights."