Cozying up to Hollywood. Ick.

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Cozying up to Hollywood. Ick.

An AP wire article about ReplayTV and TiVo cozying up to Hollywood's wishes is a little bit disturbing in how far upstart companies have to go to please the big networks. While it makes good business sense to court Hollywood and make sure they're not going to sue you out of existence (like Sonic Blue), hearing that copy-protection is always on the table, limits on what you can do once you've recorded something, and even controls on something as low-bandwidth and quality as a cell phone makes my head spin.

It's like they're the mob and they run the town so you better play by their rules or they'll snuff you out.

by Matt Haughey July 21, 2003 in News

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Well, NBC does own a stake in TiVo. Which is probably why I have only seen the "press thumbs up to record" on commercials for NBC shows.

Posted by: Rapunzel at Jul 22, 2003 4:11:07 AM

That's actually a useful feature I wish more shows/networks offered. It's a good idea too for networks to reward people for watching commercials with a convenience.

Posted by: Matt Haughey at Jul 22, 2003 8:51:20 AM

I'm failing to understand why Tivo is the only video capturing product that doesn't allow extraction to other devices. Is multi-gig file swapping really going to become an issue? For decent quality, you need to burn a DVD from the source anyhow.

Posted by: -pb- at Jul 22, 2003 11:13:08 AM

I think TiVo has always steered clear of allowing extraction because although the source is large (I hear it's about 1.7 gigs per hour of recorded TV), you can pretty easily downsample it into DIVX and trade that online (at more manageable sizes like 100-200Mb per hour).

There are packages to get extraction working (TyStudio, MacOS X tools) though they only work in the series 1 tivos. Apparently the series 2 boxes add some encryption to the video files, so they are useless once extracted.

Posted by: Matt Haughey at Jul 22, 2003 11:45:42 AM

Cozying up to Hollywood. Ick.

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