Economist Looks at the Digital Home

spisska writes "There is an excellent article this week in The Economist looking at the "digital home" and at what cable, telecom, internet, and hardware companies are doing to create the new entertainment nerve centers of the future. The article touches on what exists today (CDs, DVDs, etc), what is in production or preparation from various companies (MS MCE, IPTV, music downloads, etc), DRM, interoperability, and competing standards, among other topics. Although there is no mention of MythTV or Linux, it is a pretty solid analysis of the market as it is now and concludes that vendors are trying to hype a market into existence where there is no great consumer demand. A choice quote: "'If consumers even know there's a DRM, what it is, and how it works, we've already failed,' says Peter Lee, an executive at Disney". The article concludes: "As John Barrett, research director at Parks Associates, says, 'it seems that we've concocted a new variant of the 'paperless' office.' This, you recall, was the consensus a decade or so ago among technophiles (but almost nobody else), that computer technology would save our forests by freeing us from having to read and write on paper. Today's variant, says Mr Barrett, is 'no more tapes, CDs, DVDs, discs.' In other words, expect them to be around for a very long time to come.""

Comments

Failure

[overshoot]

If consumers even know there's a DRM, what it is, and how it works, we've already failed,

In other words, the whole plan depends on defrauding the customer into buying something other than what they were told they were getting.

Re:Failure

[Stevyn]

There is nothing inherently wrong with DRM. I think this guy is saying that DRM should always work in that if I pay for something, I should be able to play that file without having to worry about DRM. The problem, however, is that currently DRM doesn't work this well.

I have no intentions on purchasing any DRM music any time soon. I want to be able to play music files on Linux, xbox and my ipod. Currently, MP3s do the job well and I have no intentions on using anything else.

It's not going to be the technology

[Stevyn]

It's going to be how little people have to work to use it. Nobody wants another gadget that they can't figure out how to use. That said, nobody wants DRM that won't work properly. Everybody (including geeks) wants things to work out of the box and that's where these companies should focus on.

They should make lots of mockups. They should get people to let them install this crap in their homes and see how they like or dislike it. The company that rushes some central media player that can only do what my modded xbox can do now isn't going to do well. It's going to take a lot of testing to get the final product done right.

My guess is Apple might come out with some interesting products and I'm going to be watching out for what they do.

What's the magic of paper?

[psb777]

My next laptop will not have a CD reader/writer. E.g. To load a new O/S I'll download the bootable image onto a USB key. Or netboot. My music CDs are never taken out of their cases anymore. Same will happen to my DVDs, sometime. So all that off-line media which is only machine-readable will go. The article is wrong.

But paper? I carry a notebook and pen and will do so for a long time to come. No PDA for me. The article is right.

"Seamless" and "transparent" DOES mean "deceptive"

[dpbsmith]

The comments about how he just means "seamless" and "transparent" are nonsense. DRM is always seamy and murky. It becomes seamy and murky at the exact point when you try to lend your friend a recording and it won't play on their machine.

Or when you buy a new computer, copy all your stuff over, sell your old one, and find that you can't play your stuff because your new computer isn't authorized, and you can't authorize your computer because your old computer hasn't been deauthorized, and you can't deauthorize your old computer because you haven't got it.

What "transparent, seamless" DRM does is to conceal the real nature of the bargain from the customer until it is too late for it to affect their buying decision.