TiVo has rolled out “TiVo to Go,” a service that allows you to move video from your TiVo to your PC’s hard-drive, and then to burn the file to a DVD. Unfortunately, the system uses a proprietary DRM system that tethers the video to your machine and your home, meaning that you can’t move the video to your hard-drive as an MPG file that you can edit at will, send to a friend, include in a school report, grab stills out of to make a highlight reel, etc. In other words, TiVo is lagging the functionality available for free in open source software projects like mythtv.
Once selected, the secure and encrypted TiVo recorded programs are moved to the PC, where the TiVo Content Security Key is used to unlock the files for playback or burning, preventing files from being shared online, outside of the user’s home network.
The TiVo Content Security Key and the TiVo-enabled versions of Sonic Solution’s MyDVD and CinePlayer applications will be sold as a bundle at www.tivo.com.
The TiVo execs I’ve spoken with about this have expressed TiVo’s philosophy as “reasonable compromise” — delivering features that customers want, so long as it doesn’t make the Hollywood companies too unhappy. This is usually presented as a business-person’s realpolitik: look, kid, we know your ideals say that crippling the stuff we sell you is bad, but we’ve got a company to run here.
What’s funny about this is that it’s the exact opposite of the traditional way of running a disruptive technology business: no one crippled the piano roll to make sure it didn’t upset the music publishers, Marconi didn’t cripple the radio to appease the Vaudeville players — hell, railroad barons never slowed their steam-engines down to speeds guaranteed to please the teamsters.
Where does this bizarre idea — that the dinosaur industry that’s being displaced gets to dictate terms to the mammals who are succeeding it — come from?
I’ll tell you two things that are obvious to my entrepreneurial instincts:
1. There is no market demand for TiVo’s DRM — or anyone else’s. No TiVo customer got out of bed this morning and said, “Damn, I wish there was a way I could do less with my videos.”
2. If TiVo isn’t giving customers the features they want, someone else (like a commercial packager of mythtv, for example) will.
Not delivering the products your customers demand is not good business. It never has been.