PVR HACKERS
Little did TiVo know how thoroughly customers would take its slogan, "TV Your Way," to heart. A growing number of users - like those of competitors ReplayTV and Microsoft's UltimateTV - think personal video recorders should do much more than store their favorite shows. Their efforts to get what they want have stirred up new copyright issues.
Television networks have long been concerned about viewers fast-forwarding through commercials. But the real danger, they're finding, is that consumers are watching shows as digital files that ought to be under network control (remember the battle over MP3 files?). TV their way means swapping shows with friends and saving them to DVD-RAM when hard-disk space runs low. PVR owners - whose ranks will swell to 20 million by 2005, analysts say - are already adding Ethernet cards and extra hard drives to boost functionality.
PVR makers admit they're holding back features - and, in some cases, recalling them - fearing that Hollywood execs will tag them as Napster-like services. For instance, some of the first ReplayTV boxes included high-speed FireWire ports for external archiving to PCs and hard drives. The feature was later killed to sidestep copyright issues.
TiVo is looking into ways to let customers share files within their homes - from one TV to another, or from TV to desktop - though Richard Bullwinkle, TiVo's chief evangelist, says that won't happen until piracy concerns are allayed. Microsoft is taking a similar approach, admitting that file archiving is possible right now. However, Jeff Sasagawa, a senior manager at UltimateTV, says that while Microsoft plans to upgrade UltimateTV for broadband, it has no intention of releasing a box that can't distribute its content in a "secure" environment.
Several hackers, most notably open source programmer Andrew Tridgell, have figured out how to move video files from TiVo to PC with an Ethernet card. But the files, encoded in bulky MPEG-2 compression format, are too large to share easily. Much to other TiVo hackers' dismay, Tridgell hasn't made his code public, though he's shared it with a few peers and several TiVo engineers: He's sitting on it for now, partly because TiVo typically turns a blind eye to system hacks like adding extra hard drives.
The few others who have cracked TiVo's boxes now have their sights set on UltimateTV: "A lot of people bought the hardware, fully expecting to be able to use it as they see fit," says Jack Snodgrass, a TiVo hacker in Southlake, Texas.
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