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TiVo OS Update Adds Content Protection
generic-man writes "According to PVRBlog, TiVo's new operating system update enables content protection flags on a per-show basis. On some programs, notably syndicated shows, a red flag appears to indicate that the copyright holder has requested that TiVo devices not save a program past a certain date and that the program may not be copied to a PC using TiVo to Go. TiVo users were told to expect this style of flag only on pay-per-view and video on demand programming, and as such are upset that TiVo has restricted the capabilities of the receivers they bought and subscribed to use. The TiVo Community boards have some screen shots and firsthand accounts."
"Welcome to the (our DRM) future!"
- MPAA, RIAA, Disney, M$ and associates
I don't feel like it...
Is it using the evil bit?
There's something wrong about selling a device to do something, and later limiting the ability of the device to do what it was designed to do.
...it's another example to use when explaining to people exactly why they should be opposed to DRM and the Broadcast Flag. It's good that it will spread awareness of the issue, so that we have a better chance of stopping it before it becomes mandatory by law.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
But the age-old argument holds: this won't work for (just an example) my parents.
In the past, Tivo employees have been very helpful in helping users work around these types of issues - they don't really care if you record the show, install larger hard drives, pull video off to your computer, as long as they get their subscription fee.
Hopefully a workaround comes out and makes it to the forums.
Mooniacs for iOS and Android
People will continue to plunk down cash for these products and services, because most people don't care about DRM. Even this won't really affect them, why do you think you can buy the Superbowl on DVD, or the World Series on DVD? People shell out $$ for seasons and seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, etc. So they DRM the shows on your Tivo after a month.. by then people have either wiped it, or bought the damn thing on DVD.
Then there is the minority, who are not media consumers, who remain unaffected by this.
Before the tinfoil hatters come out, and blame the ??AA or the Government, think: when was the last time you watched one of those old Star Trek episodes you taped 15 years ago "in case you ever wanted to watch them again"?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
TIVO has attempted to suggest the flags are a bug. While TIVO admits to making the technology available and active, not a single content provider is using it. That said: I do think it's a bad idea.
As a TIVO owner, I have to insist that TIVO needs to remove this technology because content flags that require a time frame within which to watch the show defeats the purpose of my purchasing a TIVO in the first place. I'm their customer because I could timeshift on my terms. NOT theirs. Not Fox's. Not NBC's.
I also want the ability to transfer it to another medium. If I lose that, TIVO loses me as a customer and no amount of lifetime memberships and HDTV versions of TIVO at a discounted rate will prevent me from leaving.
If TIVO does not remove this feature, I will reconsider remaining a TIVO Customer, and both TIVO and all the content providers lose a "captive" audience member.
"Love is like pi - natural, irrational, and very important." (Lisa Hoffman)
What happens when people don't read the fine print on service agreements and that all important clause which says TiVo can change the terms of usage at any time without prior notice.
And this is supposed to be so much better than taping? The time shifting abilities of PRV's are great when watching live shows, but really the only people for whom the PVR experience is "revolutionary" are folks too stupid to program their VCR's to begin with.
This and digital cable continue to be examples of consumers choosing wiz-bang technology simply because it's new and not because it's better. Few users have the TV's or proper audio equipment to enjoy "the digital difference" but they all lap it up because of all the stations they can't get otherwise, few of them seem to think about how much more difficult exercising fair use rights becomes because of the converter boxes needed for digital cable.
It does since their strategy is not off-the-shelf sales, but rather combining with content providers such as cable and sattelite TV companies. That way they can manage to use their position of market leader with brand-name recognizability to get exclusive contracts with the provider companies.
And those companies will only allow it if there is "content protection".
It makes perfect sense if you think about their business model and who their real intended customer is.
How would you like it if you took your car in for factory service and they downloaded an update to the car's computer that restricted your speeds to 55mph because of pressure from your state highway patrol?
Don't tell me that because there was some fine print in some d@mn license agreement that you've already agreed to this ahead of time. I sincerely doubt that the TiVo license agreement clearly states: We absoutely will reduce the functionality of your purchased and owned equipment in the near future without your consent to appease the broadcasting and content creation industries.
You bought the box for what it would do at the time of purchase, and have a right to continue to expect it to perform to at least those levels in the future!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Depends on your definition of affordable.
It takes a fast PC to be able to decode in real time (2.0 ghz or so is recommended), but just recording HDTV off-the-air or from firewire doesn't take any more than recording normal TV.
For the price of a 2ghz PC (how cheap are they, now, $300-$400 for a cheapo?), you can get an HDTV mythbox. Use firewire to record and you don't need a capture card. Use an nvidia card or external converter ($100-$200, maybe?) and you can plug an HDTV right in. Bingo. Add a remote control if you're feeling saucy.
I love my TiVo, and despite reading stuff about TiVo placing ads over content, I've never seen it myself. And I'm good enough with the remote that I never watch commercials unless I want to.
But this is simply poor engineering... something I've never said about TiVo before. I understand that if I buy a Pay Per View movie for a buck, I'm not supposed to be able to watch it over and over forever... for that I have to buy the $20 DVD. So, why don't they just charge me per view? I should be able to keep it as long as I want as long as I haven't watched it. Then, after I watch it, it could be deleted, or stay on the hard drive and charge me another buck if I watch it again.
That's pay-per-view!
...if you have no way of knowing what you bought.
The most insidious thing about DRM-enabled devices is their ability to change the deal long after you've made your purchase decision.
No doubt there is a legal fiction that you agreed to some fine print somewhere that says, in effect, "I know I'm buying a pig in a poke."
We need a "truth-in-DRM" law. If there were a conspicuous sticker saying "Warning: this device may not actually record the programs you want to record. There is no way for you to know in advance which programs you can or can't record. The fact that you can record your favorite programs now does not mean you will be able to record them in the future," then purchasers would know what they were buying and the free marker could operate.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Just because it's triggered in error doesn't mean it's not a cause for concern.. This is just exposing capabilities they built into the product before they were ready to force it on their customers.
I don't want to invest $1,000 in a HD-Tivo, only to later find out that programs I record are forced to expire beyond my control. Not to mention the commercials it records automatically, popups on the screen offering more advertising, etc..
What's next? Disable 30 second skip (yes, they are getting pressure to do this)?
No thanks, my MythTV box works great, and will never be forced to obey a company's decision before mine.
Nice taking that one post on a blog out of the context of the rest of the posts. The problem is not that something triggered it, the problem is that it exists to be triggered in the first place. Most people don't like purchasing a box/service to allow them to "take back control" of their TV viewing, only to had said control taken away again.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
TiVo website blame macrovision and even go so far as to say "Please do not contact TiVo Customer Support regarding copy protection related issues" is a total cop-out.
I think every TiVo owner should precisely be contacting Customer Support about this. Jam up the telephone lines. How else is the company every going to know how their customers truly feel.
Old saying: If you don't take care of the customer, someone else will.
update: I just wanted to reiterate that yes, this was the result of a mistake on the part of the station providing syndicated shows.
Don't consider this an update -- consider a warning! Your local stations already have this switch in place, and all they need to do is flip it now!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
You can't maintain control over things you sold. If you want to maintain control, don't sell it.
So if you purchase your cable modem from your cable provider, you shouldn't have to pay for monthly cable service? It is, after all, your cable modem. You should not have to pay to keep using something that you already own.
If you purchased your cell phone from a cell phone provider, you shouldn't have to pay for monthly service. After all, you own the cell phone.. and now they want more of your money just so you can use it?
Oh wait... in both of those examples, you use the company's resources in order to use the product that you own. Kind of like how you pay Tivo to use their guide service that they maintain and operate.
By the way, you can use Tivo without the guide. It just becomes an expensive digital VCR. But a Tivo without a subscription is still far more useful than a cable modem without a subscription.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
So, if this flagging is so robustly implemented that it can be triggered by noise, how long will it take for someone to create a filter to eliminate that "noise"?
Egad, I can see it now: "With our innovative new filter, not only will your shows look clearer, they'll last longer!" Except I won't be laughing at that ad.
I can't go with MythTV unfortunately, or else I would in a heartbeat. I have DirecTV and I currently enjoy my dual tuner tivo which is able to record a show while I watch another. I would have to have 2 seperate dtv receivers to do this with myth, and that's just dumb to pay for 2 different boxes for one TV. Trust me, if there was a better way to make it work with DirecTV, I would do it in a second. I have the money, time, and knowledge to build one of these boxes - I just don't want to get rid of DTV.
He's not saying the problem is that they are selling boxes that then you have to buy service for.
He's saying that they are selling boxes and then expect you cannot modify the boxes in any way you see fit.
It's like cell-phone companies (to use your example) locking a phone to one service - users have figured out how to unlock many phones, or activate features the carriers do not want you do have.
In the case of a cable modem, you bought it and can modfy how it does routing as you see fit. Yes you have to pay a monthly service to get a connection through it, but you can still modify the box.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
A friend who deletes your programs from your TiVo when he feels like it. I have a feeling you haven't tried MythTV lately though. All the features you mentioned (and many more than TiVo has) are in MythTV today. My wife has absolutely no problems using it and any married guy will tell you the wife-acceptance-factor is one of the primary selling points of any consumer electronics device.
You clearly don't understand copyright holders. If they could, they'd charge you for each time you view their program!
When movies were shown in theaters, you had to buy a ticket anew for each viewing. (I won't tell you how many tickets I bought to the original Star Wars, but George Lucas is a rich man as a result.)
The first pre-recorded movies cost in the $80 range 20 years ago (make that equivalent to $150) now, because of the argument that you could view them until the tape wore out. Finally someone realized that lower markups on greater volumes = higher profits overall. But while the technology was to force a pay-per-view existed in a few thousand theaters, it still wasn't feasible in tens of millions of homes.
Technology marches forward. Napster now rents you music on a monthly subscription. Quit paying and all that music disappears no matter how much you paid them along the way. The content providers see the light at the end of the tunnel of true pay-per-use.
Of course, the next step on that road means you can't be saving recordings you've made for free and having unlimited viewing opportunities for them afterwards. That's the step you are seeing here for the first time in the mass market.
And this is a Big Deal because this is not a simple do-not-record flag. With it's expiration date it has become a vast expansion into limiting how and what you can timeshift. They have already put in place the framework to limit your viewing to a specific time. If you accept this, then how much harder is it to say you are limited to not only the specific short period of time, but also a limited number of viewings during that time? How does it feel to know that a person with a simple Betamax in 1977 had more freedom to timeshift and share recordings than you do with the latest TiVo?
That's why they care, and that's why they hope this one step at a time will keep your outrage at their admittedly harsh measures and denial of Fair Use low enough that eventually they'll get everything they want. And then look at how much you start paying them!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
What's wrong with wanting an appliance to be easy to use?
It has nothing to do with pretty buttons, and everything to do with having an intuitive user interface. My six year old daughter figured it out in no time flat, and she barely even knows how to read.
TiVo is also trivial to set up. Before I bought my TiVo, I spent a couple months studying my options for building a MythTV or similar box, and finally concluded that I didn't have the spare time or the patience to build one.
I wanted a box that I could just plug and have it work. TiVo came within 99% of meeting this goal. Nothing else that I have seen even comes close. I will worry about the DRM capabilities when a broadcaster or studio actually intentionally uses it.
The car analogy is COMPLETELY wrong. COMPLETELY. If you want to use that analogy, it would be more like this: "Well, this car doesn't have a V6 engine or great acceleration, but it does have excellent reliablity scores, terrific safety features, automatic speed adjusting cruise control, built in low tire pressure gauges, built in GPS navigation with voice prompting, and it gets 40mpg!", to which the car salesmen replies "but this one has a V8 and a towing package and a DVD player in the back seat!", to which the wife replies "how does any of that help him get to work, save any money, time being lost, or frustration having to fix the damn thing?"
The TiVo is great because it JUST WORKS. If I didn't know better I would think it's an Apple product. It has an interface that is simple yet elegant, and it does exactly what it is supposed to do (until this out content protection system came on line, that's a whole different story).
You don't own the content, the copyright holders do.
Timeshifting is legal. There are no expiration restrictions on time shifting. Tivo is blocking legal access to material I have a right to use.
Learn to love Alaska
"What is this crap? Fox broadcasting down eight"
How long until that red flag is accompanied by a nice big shiny "$" that will allow you to pay a TDB amount to let you keep the program a little longer?
I'm not a copyright lawyer, but doesn't it allow you to keep something you bought, in this case in the form of TiVo hardware and subscription? This has to be a violation of fair-use consumer rights, right, those don't exist anymore. This is like going to a kid Potter fan and saying Rowling called, she wants her book back or to one of those people you saw waiting in line for Star Wars III and saying Lucas called, he wants his toy light saber back and you're not getting a refund. Copyright law says once you own something you can keep it for as long as you want, give it away or resell it or even burn shoot or blow it up, anything other than making and selling copies for profit and showing it at a public performance. There may be some clause in the TiVo EULA that might allow this "upgrade".
This sounds too much like the Broadcast Flag and as last I checked it was thrown out by the courts.
F7 doesn't work, ignore spelling and grammar