In light of yesterday’s entry on DRM and competition, and the ensuing comment thread, it’s interesting to look at last week’s action by TiVo and ReplayTV to limit their customers’ use of pay-per-view content that the customers have recorded.
If customers buy access to pay-per-view content, and record that content on their TiVo or ReplayTV video recorders, the recorders will now limit playback of that content to a short time period after the recording is made. It’s not clear how the recorders will recognize affected programs, but it seems likely that some kind of signal will be embedded in the programs themselves. If so, this looks a lot like a kind of broadcast-flag technology, applied, ironically, only to programs that consumers have already paid a special fee to receive.
It seems unlikely that TiVo and ReplayTV made the decision to adopt this technology more or less simultaneously. Perhaps there was some kind of agreement between the two companies to take this action together. This kind of agreement, between two companies that together hold most of the personal-video-recorder market, to reduce product functionality in a way that either company, acting alone, would have a competitive disincentive to adopt, seems to raise antitrust issues.
Even so, these are not the only two entries in the market. MythTV, the open-source software replacement, is unlikely to make the same change; so this development will only make MythTV look better to consumers. Perhaps the market will push back, by giving more business to MythTV. True, MythTV is now too hard to for ordinary consumers to use. But if MythTV is as good as people say, it’s only a matter of time before somebody packages up a “MythTV system in a box” product that anybody can buy and use.
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