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Networked PVRs deemed illegal
A US court has ruled the remote use of personal video recorders (PVR) is illegal, according to SiliconValley.com.
The implications are that you can't store your recorded TV footage at one address and watch it at another.
The case was brought to court by major film studios including 20th Century Fox and Time Warner against a New York cable company, called Cablevision Systems, for letting users record TV shows onto a PVR, stored on a Cablevision server.
The idea was to save the cable company a pile of cash in hardware costs. Instead of recording, pausing and rewinding TV in every customer's home, Cablevision could do all that on a big, networked PVR - so no more unit and maintenance costs on the PVRs for its 3 million subscribers.
A networked PVR could make cable TV cheaper, certainly giving poorer viewers PVR capability. In my humble opinion, it's another case of big media companies being terrified of progressive technology, and being short sighted over the revenues that might arise.
"We are disappointed by the judge's decision, and continue to believe that remote-storage DVRs are consistent with copyright law and offer compelling benefits for consumers - including lower costs and broader availability of this popular technology," said a spokesperson for Cablevision.
Posted by Emil Larsen on March 26, 2007 | Permalink
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