Kudos to Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing for providing an honest reaction to yesterday’s TiVo’s TiVo-to-Go announcement. He hates it:
The TiVo execs I’ve spoken with about this have expressed TiVo’s philosophy as “reasonable compromise” — delivering features that customers want, so long as it doesn’t make the Hollywood companies too unhappy. This is usually presented as a business-person’s realpolitik: look, kid, we know your ideals say that crippling the stuff we sell you is bad, but we’ve got a company to run here.
What’s funny about this is that it’s the exact opposite of the traditional way of running a disruptive technology business: no one crippled the piano roll to make sure it didn’t upset the music publishers, Marconi didn’t cripple the radio to appease the Vaudeville players — hell, railroad barons never slowed their steam-engines down to speeds guaranteed to please the teamsters.
I agree with him to a large extent. But playing devil’s advocate, I have to point out that TiVo devices are just boxes when they have no programming on them, and the people that develop and present the programming have rights that deserve respect. I think most people that feel like I do think mostly in terms of putting a few reasonable restrictions on copying so that the value of the programming itself is not artificially deflated, as opposed to allowing the producers of programming to dictate the way people across America watch video or listen to music.
To an extent, I also agree with Doctorow when he says “There is no market demand for TiVo’s {digital rights management} — or anyone else’s. No TiVo customer got out of bed this morning and said, ‘Damn, I wish there was a way I could do less with my videos.’” No end user goes out shopping for something that restricts their right to use anything, but they will shop for things that don’t seem like they are crippled by DRM.
I can only think of a few products that have DRM in them that seem to have reasonable use restrictions: iTunes Music Store, Audible, and the non-portable TiVo devices, as long as I am willing to sit in front of a TV in my house that a TiVo is connected to. Most other solutions offered, including photo-degrading DVDs, DVD’s with embedded use counters, and copy protected CDs are really an insult to the customers who would pay to enjoy them if they weren’t so crippled.
Once you start building devices that make programming portable, you have to decide what compromises you are going to make with the customer in order to make your DRM solution seem reasonable to them. If your DRM regime doesn’t seem reasonable in actual use, then it is destroying the value of your device.
Obviously there will be far fewer buyers of devices where the perceived value is significantly compromised by DRM. So, I hope that TiVo evolves TiVo-to-Go into a flexible solution that lets customers play their content wherever and whenever they want, if what they announced yesterday isn’t really capable of making that happen immediately.