Why Hollywood Hates the TiVo Consumers Love

Denise Howell has an informative write up on a copyright debate held last week at the Tech Policy Summit in Hollywood.

Participants in the debate included TiVo (TIVO) VP and general counsel Matt Zinn, Executive Director of the Copyright Alliance Patrick Ross, Fred von Lohman from the EFF and moderator Doug Lichtman of UCLA Law School.

Two things I found interesting in the article.

The first was a challenge to Zinn suggesting that rather than building a box that recorded copyrighted content, TiVo should have asked "permission" from the studios and worked more collaboratively with them to build a box that both would have been happy with.

And the second was a challenge from the audience, by Jay Williams of the MPAA, suggesting that TiVo was inconsistent in its view on intellectual property, because while it made a box capable of recording copyrighted materially, it has also pursued a patent claim against Echostar/Dish Network (DISH).

TiVo technology and television time shifting technology have been some of the best things to come out of technology in the past 10 years. They have empowered consumers and have redefined the way that we consume content in a world increasingly driven by marketing.

Everywhere you go today you can't escape the marketing. Billboards push big bold messages across the sky. Radios blast out loud offers of diet pills and aluminum siding. The web pops up messages at you begging you to download the latest smiley emoticon packages (along with its accompanying spyware).

Not only are we as adults inundated by a daily barrage of commerce, but so are your kids.

To me, the biggest heroes of technology are the ones who empower us. The ones who build the tools that allow us to bypass the litter of commerce.

The villains are the ones who would seek to take your tools away. Those who think that you are stealing if you don't sit through a commercial about Bud Light when you watch that free episode of Cheers.

So This is America.

Comments

[John Walter:]

AFAIK, TiVo has done nothing illegal. They came up with a better timeshifting mousetrap, marketed it, and built a business.

It sounds to me like Hollywood is telling them "You should have come to us first, so we could gouge a part of either the functionality or revenue out of your business. That would have been better."

Ha! If Hollywood loses too much money and goes out of business, someone with smaller margins or better content will come along to take their place and make a business in this age of new media distribution.

2008 Mar 31 06:49 PM

[pixelm:]

Absolutely, TiVO is an innovation and has great value to consumers. But that is only the first part of the analysis. It's advertisers who paid for the "free" episodes of Cheers. As long as there are only a few people skipping ads - consumers may not notice that less money is going into providing programming. Early TiVO users get an apparent free lunch. If everyone skips commercials - there are no more shows and the TiVO becomes a useless device. It's all kind of moot at this point - TiVO is a part of the landscape and it's adapting, but it's no so clear that consumers, over the long run, win in the bargain as programming needs to be either paid for by the consumer (DVD, DTO), or the cost needs to come way down (less CSI, more reality television), or the programming needs to be something you won't watch on delay (e.g., news/sports). Skipping commercials is not much different from jumping the turnstile on the subway or sneaking under the fence at a concert - as long as the trains run and the show goes on it seems like a "pro-consumer" move. Why shouldn't someone be able to sell an "innovative" "pro-consumer" device that helps people sneak into concerts undetected? The answer is obvious.

2008 Apr 01 05:10 PM

[Natalie Fon...:]

Thomas,

I'm glad you heard about the Summit. FYI, we just posted podcasts of all of the Tech Policy Summit sessions on our site, including the one that Denise Howell wrote about. Feel free to check it out!

2008 Apr 08 11:17 PM

[JustinT:]

pixelm, maybe the answer should be for Hollywood to come up with more innovative marketing that people wouldn't want to skip (think super bowl commercials where people watch just to see them.) instead Hollywood will resist the innovation and will slowly die just like the music industry is.

Not to worry however. There are, and will be more and better (youtube like?) alternatives.

2008 Apr 09 02:20 PM