Saturday, March 31, 2007

Network DVRs Lose Round in Court

Wouldn't it be nice if you didn't have to worry about filling up your TiVo with programs or that the hard drive on the box would go south and screw up your viewing plans? That is the dream behind "network DVRs," where cable TV companies would make the copies for you and save it on their servers.

Cablevision was testing such a system, but for now the plans are on hold after the company lost a legal battle in New York. A bunch of cable networks including Disney and Fox successfully sued to prevent Cablevision from offering the service. It's basically an unlimited video on demand service, which nearly every cable company offers.

Network DVRs would be cheaper for cable operators to maintain since the storage cost per megabyte is much lower for central servers, and since they wouldn't send technicians into the field to replace broken down boxes. Customers would love it too, but the content companies want no part of it because they aren't getting any money from the deal.

This kind of service is coming, once the cable companies and content production companies can agree on how to share the ad revenue. Content companies should be excited by this because they could get all of the data about who is watching, and they could also offer the service without a fast forward so that the ads must be watched. They need to realize that prime time is coming to an end, so partnering with cable companies to milk the most from advertisers would be a smart alternative to TiVo users speeding by ads.

Posted By John Gartner at 05:38 PM
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