Imagine for a minute you go to the store. You buy yourself a beautiful filet mignon, but when you get home you realize you can’t fit that filet mignon into your freezer, so you knock on your neighbor’s door and ask if they can keep it in their freezer until you want to cook it. Of course this isn’t a problem, so your neighbor says “Okay! Sure!”

Five minutes later the farmer who grew the meat comes a knocking on your door. He tries to tell you that you storing the filet mignon in a freezer other than your own violates your meat agreement.

Stupid? Sure it is. If you’re going to eat it at home, what difference does it make where you store it?

Don’t tell Hollywood that.

Cablevision came up with a great idea. Since they have enormous amounts of bandwidth, they decided that instead of throwng a hard drive into every DVR box, they would develop a network DVR where you would record your programs and they would be stored remotely on Cablevision servers, and streamed to you as you wanted to watch them.

Simple idea.

Of course Hollywood ain’t happy with it. As with any other idea that makes your life easier, Hollywood is against it. They claim that Cablevision is creating an “on-demand” service without paying the proper licensing fee, failing to realize of course that you aren’t ordering programs but instead watching what you’ve already recorded.

This oughta be interesting. With the Congress firmly in the pockets of Hollywood special interests (and continually acting under the guise of intellectual property protection), I have a feeling Cablevision is facing a massive uphill battle.

Technorati Tags: cablevision, dvr

This entry was posted on Monday, May 29th, 2006 at 11:46 pm and is filed under Interesting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.