Beyond The Net
TV industry should embrace technology
When I first started working on the Internet in 1994, I had one of those ''aha'' moments while sitting in my parked car one afternoon because I didn't want to miss the end of an interview on National Public Radio.
The guest said someday we would be able to watch television and listen to the radio anytime, anywhere -- not just at the hour programs are broadcast. It was the irony that I was stuck in my car while I listened that helped me appreciate how much technology would change media in the future.
Now, eight years later, just as we are on the brink of almost making media-on-demand possible, the entertainment industry is trying to make it illegal.
This year, a series of precedent-setting lawsuits will affect how you view home entertainment in the future. At the heart of the debate is a new recording device that makes it easy to schedule and record TV programs, auto-skip commercials, and even send entire shows over the Internet.
The device is called ReplayTV 4000 and some 5,000 people around the United States are already using it. Several hundred thousand others are using a similar system called TiVo, but Replay TV has come under special fire because it doesn't just fast-forward through commercials, it skips them completely.
Media moguls argue that consumers should not be allowed to watch advertising-sponsored programming without the commercials because if no one watches the ads, the television industry won't have the revenue to make them anymore.
WEST COAST CASE
But five California residents who have been happily -- and, they say, legally -- using ReplayTV, are fighting back. They're taking on a long list of media companies, including Disney Enterprises, all three major television networks, Viacom International, Time Warner and Columbia Pictures Industries.
Represented by the civil-liberties group The Electronic Frontier Foundation, all five filed suit this month in U.S. District Court in California, the same federal court where a complaint was filed by film and TV companies arguing that ReplayTV enables customers to pirate copyrighted material.
This latest suit is unusual because it was filed by a group of consumers who are trying to win a guarantee that media companies won't ever sue them for using ReplayTV.
It may strike you, much as it has the five plaintiffs, that people have been recording TV shows with VCRs, sharing the videos with friends and family, and fast-forwarding through the commercials for years. (Could media companies also argue that if you get up to make a sandwich at halftime, you're breaking the law for not viewing their sponsors?)
It's not the first time the entertainment industry has tried to fight this type of consumer behavior. Hollywood lost its battle against Sony in the early 1980s after a case against the first VCRs went all the way to the Supreme Court.
This is a similar case, but what makes these devices so scary to people who make money selling commercials is that even those of us who can't program a VCR can make sure we never miss our favorite shows with ReplayTV or TiVo.
THE REBUTTAL
ReplayTV does have some built-in limitations, which the manufacturer SONICblue argues should be enough to protect copyrights. For example, you can't send files from a ReplayTV device to more than 15 other people and they cannot forward those same files to anyone else.
But media giants still argue that consumers can use these devices to send premium TV shows, such as Sex and the City, to people who don't pay for HBO.
Some savvy techies have already figured out how to get around the sending limits built into ReplayTV, so it seems likely that they'd figure out how to get around other technical restrictions imposed by a lawsuit. But that may just be further evidence that the entertainment industry is once again overstepping its bounds by going after the manufacturer when it's the users who supposedly are breaking the law.
If media companies would spend their energy trying to figure out how to take advantage of new technologies instead of trying to squelch them, they might find some new revenue sources to offset their potential losses.
Napster has already filed for bankruptcy, brought down by lawsuits claiming they were facilitating illegal activities, such as trading music online. But piracy has grown dramatically since Napster's demise, fueled by a slew of copycat companies that are proving even harder to police. The recent release of SpiderMan, which set records in box offices, also set records as the most pirated film in history.
The motion picture industry could learn a lesson from the past by considering that it ultimately benefited from the VCR. Today, 46 percent of revenue from movies comes from video rentals, while less than 25 percent is collected at box offices, according to an article in BusinessWeek.
Someday technology will make it possible to deliver multimedia content anytime, anywhere. If the entertainment industry can figure out how adapt broadcast models and use that technology in a way that is truly convenient and easy to use, I might pay extra for that service.
First publication, The Miami Herald, Mon, Jun. 17, 2002