PRPOV

I am one of those original TIVO users. I defended TIVO for years against all the things I knew they had no control over (Cable Boxes). I was an early adopter of the HD TIVO with CableCard support — and wrote my letters of complaint, not to TIVO, but to the FCC for their limited support and lack of two way communications.

But at some point I just gave up. I moved to AT&T uVerse fell in love with the multi-room feature and didn’t look back. But then I moved to Seattle, WA. I had to break up with AT&T and was forced into a relationship with Comcast and their 1990s style DVR. To put it simply Comcast sucked. I brought in an AppleTV, hacked it but was generally left unfulfilled. I attached an old laptop to the TV to run Netflix, Amazon Unbox and Hulu.

At this point my living room was looking like the service center at Best Buy. There had to be a better way to get all this stuff in one place? I looked at the Roku and Boxee Box. But I wanted local, HD (didn’t want to pay for it) and DVR capabilities.

Well, those naughty little folks over at TIVO pushed out an offer I couldn’t refuse. A new TIVO Premiere for zero down and $19 per month. It supports my HD antenna, Netflix, Amazon Unbox and will soon support Hulu. My monhtly TV costs have gone from $100 per month to less than $30 — and I get what I want, not a smorgusboard of channels I never watch.

Sales pitch over!

Look at all that stuff!

A thing of beauty

In filmed entertainment all the technology we need to share, move, and enjoy content on any platform imaginable is already here. The only thing we are waiting on is for the Digital Rights Owners to get it together.

Having said, this is a vastly complicated issue that requires action on the part of the owners (including their agents, lawyers, managers, promoters) 3^rd party sellers, their various intermediaries, and even all those artist unions. It’s an alphabet soup of crazy.

This is why intellectual property rights are the single biggest issue facing digital content distribution. Until it’s figured out, we’ll continue to get access to only a small layer of available content. This is why the channel line-up and on demand selection appears to be exactly the same whether you download it on your laptop via Amazon or access it via On Demand through cable, IPTV or satellite, et al.

With all that said, I was a little disappointed with Jonathan Miller’s (News Corp.’s Chief Digital Officer) answer to a question about copyright at today’s Tech 2.0 summit in San Francisco.

Q: Talk about copyrights.

JM: We need to have copyrights that are expected. Even in China they realize that. They have a budding content industry too. They’re very interested in copyright and piracy. I think we’ll have an Internet that respects copyright.

I get that News Corp owns a lot of content (you’ve heard of 20^th Century Fox, right?). We get that they have more freedom to move their own content around on their various holdings. But what the world needs now is more open debate about a global standard focused on letting people decide for themselves how they want to consume content.

For example, with mobile broadband speeds increasing, the need to side load content (move it manually from your computer to your mobile device) is becoming more and more unnecessary. In the future all this content will be managed in the “cloud,” and you will be able to simply push pause on one device, such as your TV, and push play to continue watching on another device, such as your laptop.

Does this mean that when we figure all this out that consumers will stop using the Internet, peer-to-peer services, usenet groups, etc. to get their content for free? No. But as any consumer survey will tell you, the vast majority of people want (and will) pay for digital content.

The industry needs to work together to figure this out. They need to focus on finding new ways to make more money, not obsess on the certain possibility that some people — people that would never have purchased the content legally anyway — might get access. It’s like a grocery chain closing down because they have a few shoplifters.