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TakeTV: Ad-supported design - October 22, 2007

SanDisk Corp. would appear to be expecting Internet-delivered video to be an ad-supported business--if it's a business at all.

Clearly the design of its new USB-based TakeTV video player is predicated on an ad-supported--rather than a pay-per-view or subscription-based--business model for downloads. Although the player is compatible with DivX DRM, SanDisk certainly didn't go out of its way to embed the sort of DRM scheme that would be needed to interoperate with a paid download service.

The players support DivX, Xvid and MPEG-4 encodings, but at least for now do not support Windows Media Video or any other format widely used by DRM-controlled paid download services. The Fanfare download service SanDisk is launching in conjunction with TakeTV is built to deliver free and ad-supported content.

TakeTV, in fact, represents something of a direct challenge to content owners. Its support for DivX and Xvid will make TakeTV players ideal for porting illegal movie and TV downloads from the PC to the TV, as most of the illegal video files on the Internet are encoded in those formats.

SanDisk says, predictably, that it does not endorse piracy. But the message implicit in the design of TakeTV is clear: Here is a low-tech, inexpensive system with which content owners can deliver video to the TV via the Internet. But if they can't figure out how to make a business out of that, there's plenty of other content out there to fill up those flash drives.


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