HBO Exec thinks it’s all in a name.
You may or may not know what DRM is. DRM stands for Digital Rights Management, and essentially it’s the copy protection on various forms of media to prevent you from playing them in an unauthorized player. Who cares if you bought the disc (or mp3, or video file,) you’re only allowed to play it in certain ways, or in certain things.
Suffice it to say, people that have heard of it before generally hate it. Consumers don’t care about copy protection. They want to be able to play their music or movies whenever and wherever and on whatever they feel like. I agree. It’s funny because despite the best efforts of the RIAA, MPAA, and software vendors invovled–it’s done nothing to help their cause. The pirates will always find a way around it, there are no exceptions. So essentially all they’re doing by continuing to chase this goose, is to annoy their real customers.
So some guy at HBO has a bright idea that will solve the problem! Change the name.
Yeah, that’s right.
He wants to switch it to DCE: Digital Consumer Enablement. I’m not sure how close to being proper english that is, but it’s pretty laughable that this is a proposed “solution.”
I don’t want to harp on the guy too badly though. He mentions the name change is in part because they want to think of ways consumers can use the content that they haven’t before, which sounds good. In the end it’s more of the same, and it’s useless.
DRM has never worked. DRM will not work. DCE while sounding more friendly, is the exact same thing, and it will never work.
HBO: Do you want our money? Then make it easier for us to get your content and pay you for it. Right now to get HBO I have to pay my cable company for a ton of channels I don’t want. I don’t get HBO because I can’t JUST BUY HBO! Want me as a customer? Give me a means to do it! You’re not going to stop people pirating your signal, so you might as well focus on the honest folk who believe in paying a fair price for a fair value. We outnumber the pirates.
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Comment by Joe — January 10, 2009 @ 9:40 pm
I recently subscribed to HBO via DirecTV. I own a DVR box and started recording movies. When I tried to copy them to DVD because I have an 80 hour box (filled with 3 1/2 hour football games among other things), I encountered the copy protection problem. Seems it’s OK to record them once (either on a DVR, DVD, VHS, etc) but not to record them again (in my case from DVR to DVD to watch a week, month, etc, later).
I have movies I recorded in the exact manner (from HBO to DVR to DVD) 2 years ago when it was allowable that I still have not watched. I had a free 3 month subscription to HBO when I signed up for DirecTV.
This is insane. I could set my DVR (satellite box) to change to a channel at a specific time and record the program directly to the DVD, but obviously can only do that once per night when I’m sleeping, or once during the day when I’m at work. What’s the difference?
You hit the nail on the head. It won’t stop pirates, but it does provide a ton of inconvenience to legitimate viewers.