TiVo Battles Hollywood Over Copyrights

The AP does a story on how Tivo is being challenged by the NFL and Hollywood movie studios over a new feature "Tivo to Go" which allows Tivo users to move Tivo content to laptops and other non-Tivo machines.

TiVo has said it wants to give users more flexibility in how and where they view their recorded shows — on an airplane or a road trip, for example — and to let them share the content with a few friends. The company says it plans to incorporate copy-restriction technologies to limit the number of devices to which the shows can be transferred, preventing unfettered Internet distribution.

The content companies don't think TiVo's proposed safeguards are adequate enough to block users from sending their recorded shows to strangers' devices across the globe, said Fritz Attaway, executive vice president and legal counsel for the Motion Picture Association of America, the Hollywood lobbying arm that filed the opposition papers.

While I certainly appreciate new features, I hope that Tivo's first and foremost concern is how to stay profitable and solvent. Who cares what features they have if the company isn't around in a few years to provide the basic service?

TiVo Battles Hollywood Over Copyrights [news.yahoo.com]

Comments

[Xrlq]

I doubt TiVo would be doing this if there was a realistic chance it would bankrupt them. Unless, of course, the DVR business has gotten competitive enough that that's a risk anyway.

Somebody needs to stand up to the MPAA. If not TiVo, who?

[Dave M.]

I'll tell ya what... With the crap that is on TV now-a-days, it's getting harder and harder to find things worth TiVo'ing! We used to have a Season Pass list of over 50 items. Now it's less that 20! We barely find enough to watch an hour a day.

I realize that we are an exception and there are literally millions and millions of people out there that watch the crap that we don't watch. However, with the trends going the way they are, when this currently TiVo dies on us, which it inevitably will, it's going to be hard to justify buying another one.

[Jemaleddin]

Speaking of the possibility of TiVo going under:

We should get a campaign going to encourage TiVo (or somebody working there) to write the code needed to allow users to set up an alternate programming info source, etc. now, not later, so that if they go belly up at some point, they can push out one last update to allow us to go on using the hardware we've purchased.

Just a thought.