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TiVo User's Fears Explored
elrous0 writes "In spite of TiVo's continuing insistence that recent appearances of 'red flag' recordings are mere "glitches," the AP is reporting that customers are beginning to get nervous about the new content-blocking feature added in a recent TiVo upgrade. The story quotes Matt Haughey, of PVRblog.com, as saying 'TiVo would be of limited utility in the future if the studios were allowed to do this with regular broadcast content ... This is like cell-phone jammers. What if you couldn't talk on your cell phone? If customers can't do something with their TiVo that they could in the past, they will stop using it.'" We've touched on this topic in the past.
ArsTechnica's Ken "Caesar" Fisher has written a rather insightful article about just this issue. Well worth the read.
As "Caesar" stresses in his article, DRM on TiVo is nothing new. There's really no point in getting steamed at TiVo about this...they're victims of DRM just as much as their customers.
If we're going to fix this problem, we need to do it at this level...not at TiVo's level.
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This is related to a previous article to which I posted my intent were tivo/"the industry" to begin to rein in my ability to:
I would pretty much dump my tivo... since those are the features of tivo that make television palatable. Since that related article, I've informally caucused friends and family with the possible changes in tivo services/features. Every single one of them agreed they'd not have use for tivo either. (And, they were all very concerned that this could happen -- especially after I verified with each one they were actually on the release of tivo that had these new "features".)
From what I've read, and my correspondence, tivo has resisted as well as they could for as long as they could. I wonder how it must feel at tivo these days when these fucktards start imposing their questionable (unethical) "standards" unilaterally. Sheesh.
Kind of reminds me of and old, old, old Peanuts cartoon... Lucy sees Linus playing with her toys, and in rage takes them all away. Linus is crestfallen, and Lucy taking pity as she walks away tosses him a rubber band, "Here, you can play with this". The next few frames show Linus becoming increasingly fascinated and entertained by and with the rubber band until finally Linus is totally in rapture. Lucy comes back, angrily rips that rubber band from Linus and says, "I didn't mean for you to have that much fun with it!".
They are of no use to me anymore. A slightly better interface than the rest just doesn't cut it.
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The growing concern by broadcasters and Hollywood puts TiVo in a spot. However, I think standing by their customers and taking this challenge head-on is a good approach. Their customers want the features they have grown accustomed to. I think it's in their best interest to fight for their customers here. Like digital music, TV is at the crossroads of a new way of viewing movies and shows. We can hope they stand at this juncture and say, "Look, Guys, this is not 1975. It's time to move into the new age here."
It's only a matter of days before a hack will surface on how to bypass any anti-recording-flag. The underground TiVo community is huge and need not worry die hard TiVo fans. Will it prevent casual TV recording? Maybe. Will it hurt the TiVo company? Probably. Can we still record what ever we want? Sure! Jason
I was just on the verge of diving into the modernity and purchase/subscribe to a DVR. Tivo was one of the top choices - but forget it now. What other good choices are there, really? Besides spending a few grand on building my own.
Tivo is great, and a few days of using it is the reason why I've been unable to watch TV without a PVR since. But for my own use, it's all about MythTV, and this story is exactly the reason. Pick whatever free PVR you want if you don't like Myth.
And if you don't like any free PVR, and are going to say something like "Free PVR X is too difficult to set up" or "X has a crappy interface compared to Tivo", I'm going to agree. But consider that in five years your Tivo is going to have the same usability and fewer features, while the free PVR will get easier to set up and use, will have more features, and above all will still be Free.
Tivo was all about taking control of your TV experience. The industry doesn't like that, and they are slowly going to take that control back. The Free PVRs, much like Free Software itself, is a way for you to keep that control.
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TiVo voluntarily added this crap to their product, so it is their fault.
(I don't completely believe Caesar's article. What law forces TiVo to implement DRM? FCC broadcast flag approval is a red herring, since the broadcast flag was killed.)
I agree with the first post: DRM is the issue, not specifically TIVO.
//e (I had a TRS-80 Color Computer before that, but I'm talking about my first usable computer). IIRC, games were $20-$30 a piece. Applewriter //e was $200. Programs were using heavy copy protection. I remember reading a lot of articles about it, and one point was that any disk that could be copy-protected could be broken. Even when IBM became bigger than Apple, for a while copy protection was big. I remember going in and using Don Lancaster's disassembly of Applewriter //e to figure out how to make my own copies of Applewriter //e so I could start modifying it on my own (and leave my precious, licensed copy safe and untouched). I stayed with Apple for a good while because it was fun, because I knew the monitor ROM closely, and because I could not afford to upgrade. Then I got a good deal on an Amiga. By the time I got back into the "mainline" again, Windows 95 was big.
//e and programs like Locksmith were all over the place -- usually as a pirated copy in the basement of a teen uber-geek who had hundreds of copied 5 1/4" disks.
I remember when I got my first real computer, an Apple
At that point almost no programs had copy protection. It had gone out of style because it cost more to keep ahead of the crackers than to just put it out and make what you could on honest customers. I remember in the material I read by Apple crackers, they pointed out that any disk the computer could run, copy protected or not, HAD to be able to be read by the boot loader, so at least the first sector had to be easily readable. From there on, a good cracker could figure it out one way or the other, as long as he took the time.
We know that any form of DRM is breakable, not just through brute force, but by reverse engineering. Yes, there's the DMCA, but tha is not going to stop cracking programs from being easily found, just as pirated software was easy to find in the days of Apple
This is just a new market. Software publishers have gotten used to knowing there are unauthorized copies of their work, in perfect digital form, being traded among the public. This same idea scares the life out of RIAA and MPAA, but eventually they'll realize that it costs more, in the long run, to keep everything protected than to just release it as is and make what you can from the millions of honest customers. They've already started to change their positions on this. When Napster came out, there was no way they wanted ANY online distribution. ITunes changed that. The studio making the Harry Potter movies announced in a press release that large batches of Harry Potter III were released without any copy protection to see how it went, since protection was so expensive to incorporate and license.
It'll take a long while, especially with Microsoft doing the Harold Hill routine (from "The Music Man") where they say, "Hey, all these people will still your stuff. You've got trouble, right here in River City," and, at the same time saying, "But I'll tell you how to fight that trouble. Just pay us tons of money and we'll make sure you don't lose tons of money. We'll protect it all!" Eventually, though, the added expense and work needed for protection and the paranoia of the MPAA and RIAA will start fading and we'll see something much more reasonable, just like we did in the evolution of software marketing.
Add to that the growth of FOSS and people with guts, like the gov. in Mass., who are beginning to see the value in open formats and software that doesn't cost a ton of money, and eventually, after all the fears are shown groundless, we'll see the entire data and content market become commodity markets, just like the expensive long distance and cell phone markets have become.
Series 2 has been network ready since it came out of the box. I bought mine in 2002 and it has never touched a phone line. As long as you bought a plain vanilla Linksys USB adapter you were good to go. The trick was to set the dial-out number to #401, which would initiate the network connection.
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If you'd already paid for a lifetime subscription, then you're cancelling of it now would not have had the same impact on them.
offered to knock the monthly down 1/2
So, threaten to leave and get your subscriptions at 1/2 price. Hummm
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Because a Tivo generally does what people want it to do. Of all Tivo owners I know, and it's quite a few, I'm the only one who even follows it enough to know about this issue. Tivo still acts as an easy digital VCR with nice software and a generally reliable schedule. That's what most people are after.
I don't know a single one in real life, as opposed to message boards, who give a flip about transfering shows to their PCs. Most don't even bother with PPV movies, which is what the expiration flag is intended for. It's just not that important. If they really, desperately want a season of a show, they buy the box set for $60 rather than spend who knows how long formatting and burning their own DVDs.
That's the thing people who push the "roll your own" solutions forget: the TIME involved. They place no value on their time. I have the skill level to do a MythTV. Heck, I have the skill to WRITE a DVR solution, but I read accounts of installs, and I'd have to be on a steady diet of boilermakers and cheap crack to waste my time like that for something as trical as television.
And if a network activates the flag to prevent recording of their show? Fuck 'em. Who cares? No Tivo owners will watch. The network is just hurting themselves.
I know people are going to mention MythTV and other DIY solutions. But I was wondering, is there a project out to completely hack a Tivo into running MythTV? That way, if the worse case happens, Tivo owners with computer skills can just migrate to other software while still using the Tivo hardware.
Exactly why is TiVo adding this functionality?
Put yourself in Tivo's place. Do you listen to your individual customers who are worried about what the industry will do and refrain from potentially screwing them all over? Or do you instead get that huge sale from Comcast who is willing to sign a contract to use Tivo hardware in every set top box for the next five years, thus forcing most cable customers to become your customer? After all, since the content providers just want the DRM there and promise not to use it till it is too late for your customers and since most of your customers won't know/care that it has happened for years it won't lose you too many sales. Tivo is just playing it safe by partnering with the big boys rather than fighting them.
Truthfully, this market has room for up to four distinct players: Content providers, hardware providers, software providers, and scheduling service providers. The big cable companies want to make sure they own all that space and will play dirty to do it. It is almost impossible to challenge them in the content space, since they are the only source of sufficient bandwidth in the last mile.
Ideally, all four of those areas would be separate and interoperable and there would be competition for each. You could buy an X brand set top PVR, install OS Y, subscribe to scheduling service Z, and still be stuck getting your content from the existing cable company. Already there are companies like Tivo and RealTV making the hardware and software, projects like MythTV and companies like Elgato providing software, and services like TitanTV selling just the subscription. This is the Cable companies ruin, so they are trying hard to maintain power. Thus they make a deal with the number one player, give them a really sweet deal with a long term supplier contract for more money and boxes than they could hope to sell on their own in years, and make sure the stage is set for them to gut the PVR space, by providing their own, limited, but cheaper (by the exact amount they just raised everyone's cable bill) boxes. No one can compete with their bundling, and they have a government enforced monopoly on the last mile that cannot be taken away easily. The result is Tivos starting to suck and be included in cable company provided boxes, that kinda sorta do what the users want, for now.
There are several possibly disruptive factors in their plans. One is cheap, fast internet that could cut them out of the loop and make them compete. Luckily for them, the cable companies and the content producers are mostly owned by the same corp. so there is little chance of that without a big indy video scene appearing. The second wildcard is Microsoft. Their media PS edition could completely screw them, but MS is planning for the long term. They will probably play nice and partner and add all the DRM they want, so long as it is MS DRM and locks everyone in to Windows for the foreseeable future. MS know some day it will all run thru the computer and that day they will subsume the cable companies. Until then they are content to build strength with their file format and OS lock in. The last wildcard is another Tivo. If someone can make a cheap enough device to do what Tivo does, that is easy to use and does not play ball with the cable companies, it could all come tumbling down. They are probably terrified of MythTV, since it cannot be bought out or bribed into the fold.
At least that is my take on it. I could be wrong.
As soon as there are SAT and Cable decoders that can be put into my home PC turned Myth box that allow me to record premium content the way I can with my hacked DTIVO I'll do it - in a heartbeat. However right now the best thing Myth seems to offer is OTA HD. Or maybe I could buy multiple cable\SAT decoder boxes and lash them to the Myth box with IRDA dongles? Umm, no thanks.
Myth is way cool, I LOVE the idea I really do. However it cannot give me what I *currently* have with the DTIVO being used in my home now. NO, *my* TIVO doesn't have this DRM code and *no* it won't have the code unless I allow it - and I'm not. I also do not see those FFWD commercials. I'm actually 2 revisions back with my DTIVO running software never meant for my box. (lol) I'll move to the 6.x code soon, really I will. But 7.2x can goto hell, I see no reason to run it and lots of reasons not to.
In any case, until I can get what I want out of MythTV I'm not wasting my time building one. OTA broadcast stuff I gave up years ago and I refuse to go back. The day they can decode my digital cable directly or attach to my SAT dish directly (as can be done in other countries apparently) I'll switch but not until then. If my TIVO suddenly stops working because they have blocked my hacks then I'll happily return it and my DIRECT subscription too.
P.S. Yes, I can do extraction, streaming, and other things on my box. http://www.dealdatabase.com/forum/ The funny thing is that I'm far from bleeding edge with what I've done on my machine!
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With Tivo's basic business model, you buy the Tivo as a way to connect to the Tivo service, and then pay a monthly fee to use that service. Under this model, what Tivo is doing is probaply okay in the same way that a cell phone company would be within the rights to change the terms of the service for peope who pay month-to-month or who have prepaid wireless.
On the other hand, I have a lifetime subscription for my Tivo. My understanding of the arrangement is that I paid a flat fee for a certain type of service, so I should be able to keep that kind of service even if Tivo changes what it offers to new customers.
But the trump of this is, I signed a contract and license agreement. So I can't complain - I knew this was probably coming, anyway. I think a lot of Tivoers are overreacting - so far it hasn't affected my service much, either - all my shows are still there by the time I get around to watching them, though we'll see what happens after this vacation I'm going on tomorrow.
Regardless, I think that the issue shouldn't be raised with Tivo, it should be raised with the EFF, the FCC, and, failing them, Congress.
I can't speak for cable users, but personally I find there to be something that's just a little bit insane about laws limiting personal use for something that's been blasted out into the universe for anyone with a radio antenna to receive. I'm fine with laws limiting redistribution and piracy, but if they're allowed to encode it into photons and then shoot them through my skull, I should be able to at least record it and watch it at my leisure, even 15 years later.
I agree to a large degree, but IMO Congress gets much of the blame.
An example I've used before is the DVD player. AFAIK there's no law requiring DVD manufacturers to enforce the instructions that prevent me from fast-forwarding or skipping whatever I want on the DVD (FBI/Interpol warnings, previews...). So why do they do it when its obvious that's not what consumers want?
The only answer I have is that they do this is that they need a valid DCSS key to play the content if they don't want to run afoul of the DMCA. To get that, they have to sign a license from the MPAA saying they will enforce their restrictions on DVD playback.
And who do we have to blame for the DMCA?
Tivo and other companies are going to run into this next. They can't "decrypt" or even provide the MPAA covered material without a license from the MPAA, and that license now stipulates enforcment of MPAA limitations.
This does go much farther than any other type of copyright protection. If I buy a book or a painting, I can color on it if I want, change the content, resell it, display it anywhere anytime I want. Welcome to the digital age.
Probably not. You need to realize that this is Slashdot where everyone, and myself included, bitch and moan about every event. A lot of people are threatening to get rid of their Tivos and invest 500 bucks, an entire week, and 1/4 of their living room to setup a MythTV box. These people are likely just using empty threats hoping to scare Tivo in to reversing the software update. Most likely, Tivo won't back off, and in a month all of this will be forgotten as long as the flag doesn't come up on regular tv shows for any other people.
We've gone through this process with Tivo users before. The TivoToGo release took too long so there were claims of canceling their service and going to MythTV. Mac users still can't download shows from their tivo and watch them on their mac without going through a PC first, as far as I know. And through it all, the people who bitched and moaned are most likely still using Tivo.
I own a Tivo. I use a mac. I hate DRM. I constantly think about how I should build a MythTV box, which shouldn't be too hard for me since I have a lot of linux experience. But I get home from work, plop on the couch, and tun on my TV to see if any good shows are waiting for me on the Tivo. There needs to be a serious and obvious interruption to my Tivo service to get me off my lazy ass so that I switch to something else.
But as far as IPTV and the such, I think podcasts might do a lot to get people moving in that direction. If you don't believe me, download iTunes (or figure out how to use some other podcast software) and subscribe to Diggnation, Systm, Rocketboom, Dawn and Drew show, and This Week in Tech. People are really starting to make some cool stuff that is totally independent and free of DRM nastiness. The content is surprisingly good. The only real problems are wading through the thousands of crappy podcasts so that you can find the rare good one, and the bandwidth needs of podcasters who get popular. But podcasts have really shown people that anyone can make a show, and some of them might even be good. So now there should be a lot of creative thinkers figuring out how to make it easier to find shows and for shows to handle the bandwidth needs. Of course there will also be a lot of creative thinkers figuring out how they can DRM podcasts in hopes of making money.... sigh.
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The answer to the question asked is: (paraphrase) If you lost functionality on a device would you stop using it? The answer is: Of course. Why would you not? I especially would not buy the product. The same goes for expiring DVD's and CD's, drm radio etc
These techniques will not lead to more sales. I would bet money on that.