Personal Media Center: Neither Dumb nor Dirty
By Dave Salvator
August 12, 2004
Never one to pull punches, our own Jim Louderback has had some pretty blunt opin-ions about Microsoft's Personal Media Center ini-tiative and the forthcoming portable video players from Creative and Samsung based around it. Jim's right that there's going to be a lot of initial stumbling blocks for these products, but that doesn't mean they won't eventually find a market.
The problem for these devices will be the same as it ever was: fair use, copyright, and digital rights management. Any content delivery device has to face down these demons, and making something useful that won't attract an army of lawyers is a delicate balancing act. But someone's going to find that balance. The road from here to there is going to be very bumpy, but we will eventually get there. Why? Because we love content.
Follow the Porn
This adage has been true with the tech industry for decades. Clothing-optional content drove VCRs sales in the early 1980s, as well as the adoption of MPEG-1 on PCs in the early '90s. Porn has also helped drive DVD player sales, though the device's first "killer app" was The Matrix. Smut peddlers were also some of the first webpreneurs to find their way to profitability in the 1990s. If you've ever enabled the Search Monitor feature in Kazaa Lite, you know that about every other search per-formed by Kazaa users is something porn-related.
Some purveyors of these new portable video players (PVP) believe P2P-obtained smut may help drive early adopters toward these products, but Jim raises a very good question in his musings: Are people going to watch this stuff on a bus or in the subway? Maybe, but I sure hope not. Microsoft apparently believes that users will grab copyrighted TV shows from P2P networks and transcode them to run on the PVPs. While that is certainly going to happen, I have a hard time believing that Microsoft would invest big bucks in this initia-tive based on that premise alone. Clearly, Microsoft envisions a model in which you have a subscription to legally download and view (but not copy) copyrighted TV content onto a PVP.
I am a proud member of the Church of the Holy DVR. It has forever changed the way I watch TV. Viewing is now done on my terms, not the TV's—and there ain't no go-ing back, ever. Until these PVPs can replicate the ease of use of a DVR, I don't know that they will have mass-market appeal.
Are there enough users out there who are going to mine multiple P2P networks for content, download it, transcode it, and copy it to the player, just to have a mobile version of the experience they've had in their living rooms for years? My instincts say probably not.
De-Balkanize the Content
In order for PVP to appeal to a mass audience, a service like MovieLink, or even the TV networks themselves need to develop some kind of content subscription model. But for this thing to really fly, large amounts of "the good stuff"—you know, the shows we actually want to see -- will have to be available from a few sources. If I'm forced to have five subscriptions to get all the stuff I want, the nuisance factor outweighs the benefit. The cable providers might actually have a play here, although it requires them understanding that if they completely ignore this opportunity it will eventually become a threat to their business. In fact, P2P trading of content from the likes of Showtime and HBO already eats into those companies' revenues, but the emergence of a PVP market will only make mat-ters worse.
Here's a place where cable providers have a distinct advantage over satellite provid-ers: without too much effort, a cable provider can provide a fat data pipe into your home, meaning you could readily download content onto your PVP to take with you. Satellite can't really do that, since it's much more bandwidth-constrained.
It's the classic "chicken-or-the-egg" scenario: cable providers would have to invest large dollars into such an undertaking and, unless there's a good-size base of players out there, the service won't really generate revenue. But, until there's a compelling content source, the PVP market will only grow slowly. PCs may be the missing link, since the ser-vice could let us watch (but not copy) content from any PC in the house. Now the whole thing is starting to look like…the DVR they already offer us. An interesting possibil-ity might be a cradle for a PVP that sits atop your cable/satellite DVR box, so when you setup a show to be recorded, you have an option to copy it to your PVP. Any cable pro-vider willing to step up and take this on would be rolling the dice—and snake-eyes are a real possibility.
As for me, I'd like to be able to download last night's episode of "The Daily Show," a recent half-hour segment of "CNN Headline News," and a fresh edition of "SportsCenter" to a PVP to watch on my morning/evening commutes. Ideally, it would be an additional service from my content provider, but do I simply have to have this content in a handheld player? Not really. With the amount of legwork involved with the current set of PVPs coming to market (mine illegal content, download, transcode, copy, rinse, repeat), the prospect seems that much less appealing. No, the content-to-PVP connection has to get easy, legal, and cheap before PVPs go mass market. Meanwhile, if you have to watch smut in public with one of these things, at least have the decency be discreet about it.
Wait until he sees OURS!!!!!!!!
