The FCC voted today, 4-1, to approve 13 proposed methods of recording and sharing digitial video. All but one method (TiVo's) prevented any meaningful distribution of recorded content. TiVO submitted a plan to allow Internet distribution to remote devices that had a TiVo security dongle attached (e.g. laptops in hotel rooms, vacation homes, extended family networks, etc). A network code in the dongle would prevent piracy. The MPAA utterly opposed the TiVo plan, wanting to limit all transfer to physical media, such as write-once DVDs, or at worst, physical home networks.
An earlier LA Times article discussed the MPAA's argument:
The studios and their allies maintain that allowing remote access to programs would undermine free local television broadcasts, the market for syndicated shows and other important elements of their business models. Hollywood also fears that viewers with high-capacity, Internet-connected recorders will have less appetite for DVD box sets of popular TV series.And there it is. The MPAA and the broadcasters do not want to change their business model, even though it's based on a thoroughly dead local-broadcast-footprint assumption. Between satellite, the Internet, and cable conglomerates, the local broadcast and local market approach to television is so obsolete that only law and more law can save it.
Under several of the MPAA-supported approaches, viewers would be able to move recordings to laptop computers and other devices that they could take on the road.
TiVo, which had 1.6 million subscribers at the end of April, wants to give viewers even more flexibility: They could transfer shows from their recorder at home to any Internet-connected computer equipped with a special TiVo security device. Each owner would be entitled to transfer shows to as many as nine other recorders and specially equipped computers.
TiVo has taken elaborate steps to prevent programs from being intercepted, duplicated or forwarded. Still, the MPAA, the National Assn. of Broadcasters, the National Football League and Major League Baseball oppose the technology, in part because TiVo owners could send their security devices and recordings to anyone in the world.
"We think that TiVo does permit indiscriminate redistribution, albeit to a very limited number of people," said Fritz Attaway, an MPAA lobbyist. "When you multiply that by 100,000 or 1 million or 10 million TiVo owners, what does that do to the business model of local broadcasters?"