Saturday, December 04, 2004
I'm not sure if this is a rant I've only directed towards my father last weekend or whether I've already posted it here, so you might have heard it already. The news that the death of the video recorder is nigh is possibly alarmist but also alarming. And I'll be worried until I hear that Recordable DVDs are properly here and reusable DVDs work without a loss in data quality (I don't keep up to date on techy matters but the last I heard there was a difficulty in making DVDs reusable due to the problem of making a permanent laser beam non-permanent). And I'm worried because, much as I love my Sky + box and have recorded and watched a lot more since I got it than in the month previous on my video and NTL box, I'm concerned on the effect it has on our freedom and control over what we watch and see.
At the end of last month I read The Anarchist in the Library by Siva Vaidhyanathan. What was interesting was his reporting on the battle between the Napsters and the Groksters and the American record companies, the Sonys et al. I'm paraphrasing but at one point Vaidhyanathan pointed out that if the record companies in the eighties had forseen the Internet and what was going to happen at the end of the nineties they would never have persuaded us to give up our vinyl in favour of CDs, because CDs have no copy protection at all, which is why I could, if I wanted to, transfer the Beatles album I'm listening to right now onto my computer and thence the Internet.
I get to store a certain amount of information on the hard disk of my computer before it's full. I can store twenty hours of programming on my Sky + box before it's full. I can transfer stuff from my Sky + box to video tape but if in three years time my video recorder were to irretrievably break down I might not be able to replace it. Then I face the prospect of only being able to keep the twenty hours of television that I like the most. When the twenty-first hour of must have telly comes along, something that I want has got to go. When I had a working video recorder it could go on to a tape. Now I've lost it, unless the production company or distributer releases it on DVD.
Recording a TV program is piracy. Piracy that no court would convict us for, unless we copied it for someone else, but piracy nonetheless. What Vaidhyanathan's book made me realise was that the companies that produce some of our music, the tv programs, the radio, all forms of media, want to remove our storage devices, or leave them in fixed-sized forms like hard disks. Getting rid of the video recorder is a plus to the Foxes and the BBC Worldwides and, if the video recorder can die before recordable DVDs really work then you'll bet they will be sidelined and TiVOs pushed as the video replacement.
What happens then? The end of new CDs. The end of new DVDs. The iStore shows us the way. I can already buy Norton Antivirus 2005 as a download from the Symantec website, which I did when I upgraded. What I didn't pay attention to at the time was that if I'd gone and bought the CDs at a store then I wouldn't have had to effectively pay for the product twice when I had my fun with reformatting the hard disk back in August. But this will be the equivelent of how things will be. You won't get to pay once to buy something and then not have to pay any more. Want to hear the latest Coldplay album? Simply pay ten Eurodollars. Really like track four? Pay another one Eurodollar to hear it again. Halfway through a song and you want to repeat a few lines to work out what's being sung, or identify a sample? That'll be ten Eurocentimes per five seconds of song per time it's repeated. And the next time you fancy listening to that album? That'll be another ten Eurodollars. There will be no more free lunches. Once they get rid of the videos, CDs, DVDs ,recordable or not, they'll go for the hard-disks. Under the guise of 'choice', you can buy a movie from SKy Movies and have some decision about when you actually watch it. You'll be able to watch The Simpsons whenever you want to. You'll be able to watch the Nine O'Clock News at six a.m. if you really want, but you'll have to pay. With greater choice comes a greater bill.
When a video is full you can simply buy another video. You can't do that when the hard-disk is used up. Should I read anything in to the fact that when my Sky + box was installed the technician showing me the basic functions admitted he didn't know how to copy something from the hard disk on to a video? It's surprisingly annoying compared to the ease of all the other functions, if you want to record something on to a video you have to watch it, you can't record the video while watching something else (I'm ignoring the fact that you don't have to watch the TV while it's copying to a video, I mean that while I can record something to the hard disk and watch another TV channel at the same time I can't record to video and watch another channel). Conspiracy theorists might like to ponder that maybe it does this only to make you consider it's not worth copying stuff to video and thus free up space on the hard disk.
Short form rant? Give video recorders as presents this Christmas, they're the only way to stop having to pay for everything in the future.
At the end of last month I read The Anarchist in the Library by Siva Vaidhyanathan. What was interesting was his reporting on the battle between the Napsters and the Groksters and the American record companies, the Sonys et al. I'm paraphrasing but at one point Vaidhyanathan pointed out that if the record companies in the eighties had forseen the Internet and what was going to happen at the end of the nineties they would never have persuaded us to give up our vinyl in favour of CDs, because CDs have no copy protection at all, which is why I could, if I wanted to, transfer the Beatles album I'm listening to right now onto my computer and thence the Internet.
I get to store a certain amount of information on the hard disk of my computer before it's full. I can store twenty hours of programming on my Sky + box before it's full. I can transfer stuff from my Sky + box to video tape but if in three years time my video recorder were to irretrievably break down I might not be able to replace it. Then I face the prospect of only being able to keep the twenty hours of television that I like the most. When the twenty-first hour of must have telly comes along, something that I want has got to go. When I had a working video recorder it could go on to a tape. Now I've lost it, unless the production company or distributer releases it on DVD.
Recording a TV program is piracy. Piracy that no court would convict us for, unless we copied it for someone else, but piracy nonetheless. What Vaidhyanathan's book made me realise was that the companies that produce some of our music, the tv programs, the radio, all forms of media, want to remove our storage devices, or leave them in fixed-sized forms like hard disks. Getting rid of the video recorder is a plus to the Foxes and the BBC Worldwides and, if the video recorder can die before recordable DVDs really work then you'll bet they will be sidelined and TiVOs pushed as the video replacement.
What happens then? The end of new CDs. The end of new DVDs. The iStore shows us the way. I can already buy Norton Antivirus 2005 as a download from the Symantec website, which I did when I upgraded. What I didn't pay attention to at the time was that if I'd gone and bought the CDs at a store then I wouldn't have had to effectively pay for the product twice when I had my fun with reformatting the hard disk back in August. But this will be the equivelent of how things will be. You won't get to pay once to buy something and then not have to pay any more. Want to hear the latest Coldplay album? Simply pay ten Eurodollars. Really like track four? Pay another one Eurodollar to hear it again. Halfway through a song and you want to repeat a few lines to work out what's being sung, or identify a sample? That'll be ten Eurocentimes per five seconds of song per time it's repeated. And the next time you fancy listening to that album? That'll be another ten Eurodollars. There will be no more free lunches. Once they get rid of the videos, CDs, DVDs ,recordable or not, they'll go for the hard-disks. Under the guise of 'choice', you can buy a movie from SKy Movies and have some decision about when you actually watch it. You'll be able to watch The Simpsons whenever you want to. You'll be able to watch the Nine O'Clock News at six a.m. if you really want, but you'll have to pay. With greater choice comes a greater bill.
When a video is full you can simply buy another video. You can't do that when the hard-disk is used up. Should I read anything in to the fact that when my Sky + box was installed the technician showing me the basic functions admitted he didn't know how to copy something from the hard disk on to a video? It's surprisingly annoying compared to the ease of all the other functions, if you want to record something on to a video you have to watch it, you can't record the video while watching something else (I'm ignoring the fact that you don't have to watch the TV while it's copying to a video, I mean that while I can record something to the hard disk and watch another TV channel at the same time I can't record to video and watch another channel). Conspiracy theorists might like to ponder that maybe it does this only to make you consider it's not worth copying stuff to video and thus free up space on the hard disk.
Short form rant? Give video recorders as presents this Christmas, they're the only way to stop having to pay for everything in the future.
