The digitization of entertainment has finally spread into home
video recording and TV; and, once again, the thorn in our
technological ass is the entertainment industry.
Ever since the marriage of the two, the entertainment industry
has tried to damn the positive flow of technology. Why? (Hint: the
answer to most questions is money.) Of course, this is pure
economics.
The Motion Picture Association of America sued Sony in the early
’80s to prevent the release of its Betamax videocassette
recorder. In 1982, MPAA President Jack Valenti claimed the VCR
would end the movie and television industries by allowing people to
record and share shows with commercials cut out. The joke is
consumers now spend twice as much money on movies in Blockbuster
than what they spend at the box office. Don’t you get the
picture (and sound), entertainment industry?
Right now, some network executive or record producer is sitting
in his leather chair lamenting the day personal video recorders hit
the market (that day was back in 1998). I’m sure the
entertainment industry wishes technology had never progressed
beyond vinyl and 35 mm.
The situation has always been the same. The entertainment
industry sues technology makers to prevent the release of
technology which can enhance our enjoyment of entertainment. The
current squabbles hearken back to the days of player-piano rolls,
which were said to bring about the end of real musicians.Â
The latest victim in this battle of dogged myopia is the
previously mentioned PVR (aka digital video recorder). You probably
know them as TiVo and ReplayTV, the two competing formats. (Beta
and VHS anyone?) Need I write more? The predictions are the same as
they were 20 years ago except now the word digital modifies almost
every noun.
Are these boxes just purveyors of digital thievery? Of course
not, you motherdigitaling bastards! However, combined with the
widespread adoption of HDTV (projected to occur by 2008), PVRs
could theoretically record a movie in high definition (twice the
video resolution of DVD) with 5-channel digital sound. Current
players are already able to record digital picture and sound-off of
their built in DirecTV receivers. My point ““ the
entertainment industry has a legitimate reason to be weary of new
technologies.
Everyone knows the story of MP3s. Amazing advances in
compression lead to the easy transferability of music, and the
result: Napster. The entertainment industry sues Napster and the
result: non-centralized file sharing with even more potential than
Napster.
Now we have nice coinages like “Napsterization”
(thank goodness AudioGalaxy didn’t come first) and file
sharing is as big, or bigger than, ever. Despite the Recording
Industry Association of America’s use of digital rights
management on CDs such as *NSYNC’s “Celebrity”,
the tracks from those CDs can still be readily downloaded on Kazaa
or Bearshare.
The MPAA’s attorneys must have been getting bored, but
luckily, TiVo’s competitor ReplayTV released a PVR last year
with the ability to fully edit out commercials and send edited
video over a phone line (non-broadband) to other ReplayTV users.
Subsequently, NBC, ABC and CBS filed a multi-million-dollar lawsuit
against SonicBlue, the maker of ReplayTV.
The official claim was that SonicBlue’s PVR
“violates the rights of copyright owners in unprecedented
ways” and “deprives the copyright owners of the means
by which they are paid for their creative content, and thus reduces
the incentive to create programming and make it available to the
public.”
So where are we one year after that lawsuit? SonicBlue is still
alive, though far behind TiVo’s base of about 2 million
units. Their current PVR can record 320 hours of video, and
still skips commercials and shares files over a built-in modem.
The future looks bright. Informa Media estimates there will be a
half of a billion PVRs on the market by 2010. ReplayTV is projected
by the Consumer Electronics Association to pull in $8 billion
annually on PVRs. That’s just a tad below the annual box
office earnings. The consumer electronics industry itself is a
$100-billion-per-year industry ““ easily dwarfing the
entertainment industry.