Corporate earnings calls may sound like they're about as much fun as a hearse, but the occasional interesting nugget does emerge. For instance, Time Warner cable has just acknowledged that it would love to roll out a legal-for-now network DVR, assuming that the recent Cablevision appeal stands.
After being tangled for several years in the court system, the Cablevision lawsuit was settled by an appeals court this week, and the court ruled in favor of the "network DVR." The gear for this system would actually remain in the cable company's back office, cutting down substantially on upfront hardware investment and support costs; customers would access it though their remote controls. Each household would still need to choose which shows to record, though. Cable companies would be on far shakier legal ground if they simply began archiving their entire feed and offering it back to customers for anytime viewing.
According Multichannel News, which listened in on the Time Warner call, CEO Glenn Britt talked up the network DVR tech and said his company would love to roll it out.
"We’ve said for a long time that a centralized network DVR is a better engineering solution than having hard drives all over everybody’s home," he said. "If this particular court case is upheld, we will deploy that."
Ars asked Comcast, another of the country's leading cable operators in terms of subscriber size, if it planned to follow suit. The company said that discussions about a rollout had taken place in the past, but it was too early to say for sure what the cable giant might do.
Buffered content
One of the key issues in the Cablevision case was the nature of video buffers that Cablevision's equipment would use—would 1.2s of buffered content count as a "copy"? And if so, was Cablevision then making a "copy" of the broadcasters' complete works? And was this copy infringing?
The appeals court said no, the buffer did not count as infringement, and the court's technical analysis of the system was a key reason behind its ruling (so long as the device is simply responding to a customer-initiated request, it doesn't appear to matter where it's located). But Public Knowledge points out that a similar buffer issue is currently under consideration at the Copyright Office, this time involving music delivery.
The Office is currently proposing new rules for companies like webcasters. When they buffer music for playback, those buffers may turn out to count as "reproductions." If that's the case, webcasters would have to pay 1) a performance right (for streaming) and 2) a reproduction right (for the copy).
The "buffer" and "cache" issue has been contentious for years when it comes to copyright, affecting everything from music to TV to Google, and it now appears that the courts and the Copyright Office could be moving in different directions.
Cablecos ponder networked DVRs in wake of Cablevision ruling
