WashPost (reg required) today:
TiVo, the company that makes the digital-video-recorder boxes that inspire such strange idolatry among their users, is in a weird spot. It’s asking the Federal Communications Commission for permission to add a new feature — the option for a TiVo user to send recorded digital TV programs via the Internet to nine other people. …
…For this, the company has drawn the ire of the National Football League and the Motion Picture Association of America, which have asked the FCC to deny TiVo’s proposal.
The NFL says that TiVo’s Internet-sharing feature will allow people to send game broadcasts to blacked-out viewers in real time (a team’s home game can be aired locally only if it sells out beforehand).
I don’t know about you, but sending multi-gigabyte three-hour files around the net is not my idea of fun, at least until the Koreans show up with fiber to the home.
What I *do* want to do is cut and paste clips from shows I’m watching that I find interesting, illuminating, or funny and send them as email or IM or cel clips to my friends, and I may well want to send more than *nine*, for chrissakes. The ability to comment upon, promote, append, adapt, and tinker with my media is what I want. I have NO INTEREST in hijacking re-runs of “Friends” and sharing them with my real friends. Hey TiVo and the content cabal: You want to put in technology that stops me from doing that? Be my guest. But don’t kill the ability to cut and paste, comment, collaborate, edit, append, amend – you know, all the things that we can do right now with text and images. That’s what built the web, you dunderheads, and it’s what will ultimately save your business, if you could simply stop driving by looking over your shoulder. Grrrrrrr.
More from the Post:
(Tivo’s) proposed system is thoroughly hobbled. The people to whom you’d send recordings online would need you to add them to a “secure viewing group” by ordering special security keys for their Windows computers, associated with your TiVo bill. Each viewer would need to plug one such key into a PC to receive, watch or edit your recordings.
Hobbled? More like insidious, stupid, dumb as a sack of hammers. Jesus.
Hat tip to loonyblog for the image.
I just want to be able to watch programs on my laptop.
Too Bloody right and you were overdue a good sound off (you can almost see the steam rising of that post
I wrote a review comparing the new HDTV Tivo with Microsoft’s Media Center Edition PC at my blog http://thomashawk.com.
The big question here is why is no one going after MICROSOFT?!!!
I think that is very very very interesting that Tivo is having this problem when I can pull broadcasts off of my Microsoft Media Center PC very easily and send them to not 9 but 109 of my favorite friends. Furthermore I can strip audio out of live concert performances and place the bootleg mp3s on kaaza, etc.
Tivo is taking the abuse on this one because as a company they are weak. And while Microsoft plays second fiddle sicophant to HOLLYWOOD, they are bringing in the grandest Trojan Horse of them all (the historical one not the virus) and it’s only a matter of time before everything is flying everywhere over the internet and many more PCs are sold (with Windows on them by the way… isn’t Tivo Linux based, opppsie).
Broadcast flags? We don’t need your stinkin’ broadcast flags. Remember the little black marker trick and the copy protected CDs? Come on, who’s kidding who?
Tom
http://thomashawk.com
What about us Mac users? I can’t use a sharing feature, even though I’ve had tivo for a couple years?
Good thing I’ve got a digital camera, Firewire, iMovie (for editing out commercials) and a dual-layer dvd burner (even if blanks cost $14 a pop).
My buddies may not get “real-time” football games, but if I FedEx out copies Monday morn, they can watch those blacked-out games Tuesday night. I think I’m on to something there… As long as they pay me for blanks, shipping and the 6 or 7 hours of post-production.
cheers