Media Wonk

Whole lotta shifting going on - January 12, 2007

LAS VEGAS--Video was on the go at the Consumer Electronics Show here this week.
Nearly every keynote, press conference and panel discussion, it seemed, apart from those in the car-audio portion of the show, concerned the means and methods for moving video from the point of acquisition, to some other location or screen for viewing.
CBS president/CEO Leslie Moonves described the network’s new plan to let viewers clip and “sling” snippets from its shows to friends over the Internet using a Slingbox.
Cisco Systems CEO John Chamber called video the “killer app” that is driving a new boom in digital network building.
Disney chairman/CEO Robert Iger boasted that the studio’s movies and TV shows have been legally downloaded to iPods and other devices over 120 million times. And he unveiled plans to let viewers collect and publish clips of Disney content on a MySpace-like social network.
Motorola announced a deal with Comcast to provide set-top boxes containing Motorola’s Follow Me TV feature, which will allow Comcast digital cable subscribers to move video around a home network and to compatible mobile devices.
A few hundred miles away in San Francisco, meanwhile, Apple Computer (now rechristened Apple Inc.) tried to steal some of CES’ thunder by unveiling Apple TV, a new system for streaming Internet video content wirelessly to a television set.

FROM TECHNOLOGY COMPANIES, to service providers to content owners, the drive to make video as easily portable and port-able as music has taken on something of a gold-rush air.
But as with the endlessly disputed claims and rough justice of the old mining towns, gold fever can lead to conflicts.
Who, for instance, actually should be permitted to move all this video around?
Motorola’s Follow Me TV consists of a main set-top box containing a digital video recorder that then streams the video to one or more satellite STBs.
The system lets you pause viewing in the living room and resume where you left off in the bedroom without the need of a second DVR.
That’s great for Comcast, so long as all the boxes are under the control of the cable operator, because it means more boxes in subscribers’ homes and an additional feature of its service for which it can charge a fee.
But what if the boxes are not owned by the cable operator?
What if the consumer buys a Slingbox from Best Buy, and uses it to stream her cable service to her laptop to watch while traveling?
That’s great for Best Buy and Slingbox (not to mention the consumer), but it’s not something the cable operator can add to your monthly bill.
What if the receiving device is an Apple iPhone, connected wirelessly to the Internet via Cingular’s Edge Network?
That’s a capability Cingular can add to your bill, but again, not the cable operator.
Those are just a few examples of the many conflicts that are likely to arise as video becomes more portable.
Most will boil down to the question of who really owns the consumer: the initial video provider, the device maker or the streaming service provider?

BEYOND THE BUSINESS DISPUTES, there is the separate—and equally contentious—question of whether consumers have a clear right under existing copyright law and judicial standards to be place-shifting video at all. Or whether device makers and service providers have a clear right to furnish the means to accomplish it.
At CES media executives Iger and Moonves talked boldly of making their content available “anytime, anywhere, and on any tye of device,” but that doesn’t mean they don’t expect to be paid for it.
In his keynote address, Iger boasted that Disney movies and TV shows have been downloaded legally over 120 million times, thanks to deals with Apple’s iTunes and other online services.
But you wouldn’t need to pay for the iTunes versions if you could just record the shows on your DVR and move them to your iPod yourself.
That’s just the sort of place-shifting functionality cable operators would no doubt love to offer. But Disney would also no doubt sue them.
Consumers have a clearly established right to record TV programs for private, non-commercial use. But anything that results in a second recording, content owners would argue, falls outside the scope of the existing legal standard established in the Betamax case.
Whether streaming a recording without making a second copy falls outside that scope remains to be decided.

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