Friday, Aug 29, 2008
The latest developments in TV-show-trading technology mean you don't need TiVo to watch what you want, when you want.
Aug 11, 2004 | When the Federal Communications Commission gave its blessing on Aug. 4 to a new TiVo service that Hollywood has opposed, the decision was widely hailed as a triumph for techies. The news was both unexpected and unlikely -- these days, government officials rarely move against the wishes of giant media companies.
TiVo's upcoming service, called TivoToGo, will allow users to send recorded TV shows across the Internet to PCs or to other TiVo machines, a functionality that TiVo says customers have long demanded. Although TiVo has imposed a host of restrictions on the system, media firms told the FCC that TivoToGo would cause immense harm to their bottom line. The FCC didn't buy it, and geeks were ecstatic: "Three words.... There is a GOD!" wrote one Slashdot reader in a typical note of glee.
The closer one looks, however, the less divine the FCC's approval of TiVo begins to appear. For one thing, the new TiVo service seems pretty hard to fall in love with. It's strapped down by a surfeit of copy-protection mechanisms that many people will probably find tedious if not odious. For instance, the service will allow users to transfer shows only to a small number of machines registered on a single customer account; technically, says James Burger, an attorney for TiVo, the system is meant to let users move shows from one of their TiVo systems only to another (say from a summer home to a winter home), and not even to friends or family.
TiVo was required to lock down its system and to seek the government's approval in order to comply with the "broadcast flag" rule, which the FCC adopted last year. The rule is designed to prevent the widespread trading of television shows as we enter the age of high-definition digital television. Hollywood's nightmare scenario is that high-def TV will become "Napsterized," with shows available online to anyone, anytime, for free -- which may sound, to some TV fans, less like a nightmare than a heavenly dream.
And, indeed, despite Hollywood's efforts, it's a dream that in many ways is coming true. While the government and Hollywood fret over ways to keep high-definition television off the Internet, copies of standard-definition TV shows are now heavily traded online. Once an underground activity plagued by hard-to-use tools and shows of less-than-stellar picture quality, the systems for finding and downloading TV are steadily becoming easier to use, and the current watchability of the shows is nothing to scoff at.
In recent months, a host of developers and TV enthusiasts have been working on ways to improve online trading -- they're building sophisticated networks to record and encode and distribute shows, and they're improving peer-to-peer transfer systems to make downloading easier. The hottest new improvement is made possible by the merging of two Internet innovations, the peer-to-peer protocol BitTorrent and RSS, the popular Web syndication standard. Together, these systems enable a computer to automatically find and download a user's favorite shows -- something like having a TV station designed just for you.
To be sure, the shows being traded online don't have anywhere near the quality of high-definition television broadcasts, and those HD shows are what the FCC's broadcast flag rule is meant to protect. Critics of Hollywood are skeptical of its claim that digital television will one day become a hot commodity online -- at full resolution, a typical one-hour digital show requires 14 gigabytes of hard-disk space (more than three times the size of a DVD), and days to transfer at today's broadband speeds.
But even if the shows currently online aren't of HD quality, many people will probably find them good enough -- if you have a big monitor on your machine, or if you connect it to a standard-size television, most of the shows you find will look decent. And anyway, in TV, unlike the movies, picture quality isn't paramount. At least, it's not as important as freedom, the right to do whatever you want with your set, to watch what you want when you want, which is what online TV trading allows, and what the future high-definition, broadcast-flag-protected world will not.
Indeed, the most troubling thing about the FCC's broadcast flag rule is that it seems designed to stamp out the idea that we're free to do what we want with TV. As many critics of media firms have pointed out, there's something deeply unsettling about the fact that TiVo, a firm that completely remade the way we watch TV, needed the government's permission to release a new technology. You don't have to be a techno-libertarian to find this state of affairs troubling. Sure, this time the FCC allowed TiVo to innovate -- but the decision could easily have gone the other way. In the future, what other technologies might the government deem too dangerous to be invented?
Get Salon in your mailbox!