Hollywood sues Cablevision over network DVR

Posted May 30th, 2006 by Chief Gadgeteer

In another example of greed and fear among huge corporations, 4 Hollywood studios and the big 3 television networks sued Cablevision over their plan to launch an on-demand service that could replace the consumer’s TiVo/DVR. So instead of recording stuff to your own home DVR, you would record it to a DVR run by Cablevision on their servers. The studios and networks are crying copyright foul, because Cablevision is copying and retransmitting material that they didn’t license. Hmm… the consumer didn’t ‘license’ it either, did they? To me, this seems like a value-add for Cablevision customers and that’s it. I don’t really see how this particular issue as being one of competition, but isn’t it ironic that in our competiton-driven economy how afraid companies are of just that?

Posted in Miscellaneous