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[bryant]

Coming this fall: TiVo to computer functionality. It’s not what I’d like, since you don’t get full functionality — it’s some encrypted video format. Mind you, DRM is generally broken… but in any case, it’s more than we had before. I would very much like to be able to easily copy programs from my TiVo to a DVD.

Cory Doctorow, bless him, is up in arms. However, I think his analogies suck. While TiVo is a disruptive technology business, it is not much like steam engines. It’s a different delivery mechanism rather than a new media form.

And as such, right now, it’s dependent on the content providers who TiVo is attempting to pacify. TiVo, as a company, gets absolutely nothing from the legions of amateur moviemakers out there. It doesn’t have a business model without the networks. TiVo has little choice about pacifying the networks. It sucks, but it’s true.

And when Cory says “There is no market demand for TiVo’s DRM,” he’s right. But there is going to be market demand for what TiVo is offering, even if there’d be more market demand for the same thing sans DRM. TiVo has to decide if they’ll make more money by removing DRM after figuring in the cost of lawsuits.

I’m inclined to cut TiVo some slack. They’ve introduced the disruptive technology to the mainstream. Someone had to take that risk, and it wasn’t going to be the open source community. MythTV is great but it’s not the innovator; that’s TiVo. I appreciate what they’ve done.

And now I hope that someone does pre-package MythTV as a commercial offering without DRM. That’d be great. I’m just not going to savage TiVO for not going as far as I’d like.

Comments

[bryant]

There's a lot of bias in that question, but I would say yes.

I would rather that TiVo exist than not exist, even if it's shipping products that are not as good as I'd like. I do not begrudge TiVo its attempt to shield itself from lawsuits. If I want to do something that will get me sued, I should be willing to get sued.

Let's turn it around. If TiVo ships a product that doesn't have DRM, do you sing "La la la, not my problem, let TiVo handle it" and enjoy the usefulness of your product, while TiVo gets sued? Or were you planning on sending them some money to cover the cost of the lawsuit?

[vspope.livejournal.com]

Oh, don't get me wrong, I understand _why_ TiVo is covering its ass via DRM, and it's a reasonably smart business plan. Better half a loaf than none.

That's with the assumption that there will be a crack for the DRM relatively rapidly, and given what's happened with most other media standards, that's not a particularly outlandish assumption.

I'm just curious what TiVo will do when presented with such a crack. Will they adjust their product's software to compensate (and again when Crack v2.0 comes out, and so on), or will they say "We're providing a DRM'ed product and that should be good enough" and leave it at that? THAT's what I'll be watching with profound interest.

[bryant]

It's a fascinating question.

TiVo's had a real on-again off-again relationship with those sorts of cracks. They used to provide a fair amount of friendly support for hidden codes and suchlike, in exchange for the TiVo community sites keeping quiet about ways to extract video. I've heard some noise about that relationship deteriorating -- certainly it's possible to find boards dedicated to video extraction pretty easily now.

Series 1 TiVos were easy to get shells on. Series 2 -- not so easy, but still possible. TiVo has a history of compensating, in other words. I'd expect compensation, but not necessarily quick compensation.