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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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They are of no use to me anymore. A slightly better interface than the rest just doesn't cut it.
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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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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.