Home Video Server - a DVD-friendly kit

The tale of the little Dutch boy who saved Holland by putting his finger in the dyke is widely known, though the story was an invention by American author, Mary Mapes Dodge, who included it in her 1865 book The Silver Skates. The account of the young innocent who prevented disaster captured popular imagination and, although one finger never stopped a flood, it is quoted whenever anyone tries to evade the inevitable, recalls BOB AUGER.

The current attempts to contain the flood of video piracy are as much in touch with reality as was the child in the fable. Great though the idea of plugging the leak by legal threats may be, it would be better if the average consumer was gently guided into lawful activity. Defeating organised crime means action in the street markets, criminals are not deterred by the occasional warning letter.

All of us infringe rights from time to time, particularly if we use a computer. To your passionate protests that you have never ‘ripped’ a DVD in your life, consider that scanning a printed page, copying a favourite font, forwarding a news story or even transferring your CDs to Compact Cassette probably steps outside the law on copyright. DVD copying has become so simple that anyone can do it, which more and more people do for reasons other than piracy. It’s not the first time that technology has threatened the status quo.

When the first video recorder to deliver broadcast-quality pictures was demonstrated at the Chicago Hilton in 1956, the assembled entertainment industry executives applauded. It wasn’t until 1984 and the arrival of Betamax that Hollywood woke up to the perceived threat of consumer video recording. Universal, with others, tried to hold Sony responsible for contributing to violating media companies’ copyright by making video recording technology available to everyman.

As history reveals, Sony both won and lost that battle, when the Supreme Court decided that “the sale of VTRs to the general public does not constitute contributory infringement of respondents’ copyrights.” The general public showed their gratitude by deciding that VHS was the more appealing format.

The court judgement, accepted in countries around the world, led directly to the creation of the videocassette business, a money-spinning outcome that the Studios certainly did not anticipate at the time.

Despite the windfall revenues from VHS, the Film industry (with the notable exception of Warner) once again led the charge from behind when DVD arrived in 1996. Instead of embracing the new format, they insisted on all manner of encumbrances, including Regional Coding and lengthy theatrical windows, as a way of protecting cinema income.

Yet again, industry fears proved groundless and both DVD and cinema revenues soared. In May 2004 Bob Wright, CEO of Universal (the Studio that had initiated the Betamax case against Sony) was moved to claim that “DVD provides such a reliable stream of profits to the motion picture companies that I have rescinded previous reservations about the volatility of the movie business.”

Faced with the evidence that profits accrue in spite of attempts to plug holes by legal means, the arrival of Broadband has not been greeted by the removal of the finger from the dyke, even though greater revenues for shareholders could be on offer. At a time when the Studios warn of ever-greater losses from illegal copying, we need to look at the nature of the threat and the opportunity that exists.

With the arrival of higher speed connections, Studios have predictably greeted the Internet as a catalyst of dire consequences — unless the general public is prevented from using technology that has been placed in its hands by the consumer electronics industry.

Depending on your viewpoint, there’s more bad news to come. In the UK, consumers believe that 512 kilobits per second is Broadband, while some users elsewhere in Europe can connect at speeds of up to 100 Megabits per second. In Japan, Softbank launched a Gigabit service (1,000 Mb/s) in October 2004, priced at around £31.50 a month. Then, there’s 7-10GB Internet2 just round the corner…

The proponents of Internet2 commissioned a comparative test to see how long it takes to download a feature film on DVD, without losing quality by applying extra compression. Not just the movie was transferred but also the extras, multiple audio tracks, subtitles – in fact all the data on the disc. The title selected for this test was The Matrix, a film that has been widely pirated in the past.

In the time it takes to arrive, dial-up users could rent online and receive the DVD through the post, DSL subscribers could walk to the nearest Blockbuster and back and anyone blessed with a T1 connection could put in almost a full day’s work. With Internet2, there’s barely enough time to microwave the popcorn. The complete title arrives 30 seconds after clicking on ‘buy’. VOD anyone?

Then, there is Wireless, a term making a comeback years after being almost eclipsed by the word radio. When Marconi sent the first signals across the Atlantic from Newfoundland in Canada over 100 years ago, the last thing on his mind was regional coding. He was happy to be able to communicate across continents.

Governments had other ideas, attempting to control the airwaves by, for example, making amateur radio enthusiasts pay for a license to speak to like-minded people on the other side of the planet. They were unable to halt the march of progress. Today, technology means millions of us carry portable transmitter/receivers around in our pockets and these wireless sets can call Newfoundland or anywhere else in the world.

3G networks will make motion picture entertainment available to us wherever we may be. What we will come to take for granted on our video-enabled mobile phones will be delivered to our computers and TV screens.

The man on the move today is James Behrens, CEO of Orb Networks. He can watch his home TV channels anywhere in the world. He can also access stored media on his home computer, listen to his personal music library, entertain companions with his vast photo library and generally make himself at home wherever he may be.

He has a ‘nanny cam’ in the nursery as well, keeping an eye on his kids when he’s thousands of miles away. And as he cautiously points out “I’m responsible for using the software responsibly and complying with copyright law and any applicable service restrictions.”

This ‘Personal media portal’ was voted ‘Next Big Thing’ at the Consumer Electronics Show held in Las Vegas in January 2005 and it is available today. Behrens confirms that “Digital Rights Management always comes up” when this technology is discussed. He says “We are in constant discussion with the major content providers, wireless carriers, consumer electronics companies and even the top executives at the US Federal Communications Commission.

Orb’s solution prevents consumer accessing content they don’t already own and Behrens says that once people understand what Orb is doing there is always the same reaction – “We want to work with you to bring this service to our customers.” Herein lies the next headache for the MPAA, FACT and other interested parties. If you already own it, shouldn’t you be able to watch it wherever and whenever you want?

There was a time when the answer to this question was self evident. Watch your VHS cassette in your neighbour’s house and you didn’t break any rules. If you owned a hot film title you could become quite popular. George Atkinson, is credited with inventing the rental business in 1977 when he bought one copy of the first 50 VHS titles released and charged people $10 a day to watch them.

Not unexpectedly, he was rapidly faced with legal action, which was as successful in holding back the dam as many prior and subsequent cases. American law was found to allow rental and resale of titles you already own and Atkinson went on to build a chain of 600 video rental stores in the USA.

Today, your wireless network can extend through the wall and into your neighbour’s house. Should you be allowed to share a few beers while watching a DVD that is in your PC next door? Or view a film coming from your Home Video Server (HVS) across the street? Maybe let the children look at Finding Nemo in the back seats of your 4x4? Or even watch your copy of Shaun of the Dead in your luxury holiday home in Marbella, even though you didn’t pack the DVD?

Personal network technology means you no longer need to take physical media with you when you leave your house — except to comply with the law. The technological flood that this sets free is not going to be prevented by legal action, which is not to say that piracy should be allowed to flourish unchecked.

Rights owners should continue to receive appropriate payment for the right to watch a video, regardless of delivery system. Somehow we have allowed the content creation and content delivery to be connected and, far from being threatened by the new technology, rights owners could benefit from additional royalties if the digital version is distributed.

Additionally the consumers’ love of physical media should be encouraged, since it has frequently been observed that people prefer to receive an actual object as a gift, rather than, say, a subscription to an Online service. This translates directly into retail sales.

It’s at the playback stage that DVD as we know it is most likely to change, though Europe may be a couple of years behind North America as usual. A recent Parks Associates study forecasts US sales of Home Video Servers to increase from 6 million units in 2004 to almost 25 million in 2008. Yet a Google search for the term in the UK revealed fewer than 18 results. The HVS trickle has yet to become a flood but its progress will be inexorable.

Kaleidascape, a small Canadian company, offers a Home Video Server that stores over 150 DVDs on an internal disk store for around $27,000. Using the slogan “It’s your world – take control”, US supplier AMX proposes numerous options for playing DVDs in any room in the house from a central location. And the Philips Streamium, which boasts a 5-DVD autochanger, is a mainstream consumer electronics solution under the guise of a Media Manager, that offers a way to eliminate the bird’s nest of cables that most of us have in our homes.

Three examples of innovation but only Kaleidascape got sued by the DVD-CCA (Copy Control Association) for “circumventing CSS”, even though the company had negotiated what it thought was a legal license to use CSS in the product.

The ownership of the physical DVD disc could become the key or token that signifies you have a right to watch the content – but only on the systems that belong to you. You would not be able to share the DVDs you own with others unless they were a part of your personal video network.
Imagine a future vision of DVD playback. The Kaleidascape (or a similar HVS product) is just a disc store – a kind of autochanger that only plays DVD titles while they are inside the box. When the disc is outside the HVS, any DVD is as vulnerable to copying as it is today. Once safely inside the server, the data can be as strongly encrypted as required, both on the hard drive and when the data is streamed over the user’s personal network.

So you buy the DVD, put the disc in the HVS and it is transferred to the hard drive. Play it as many times as you want, in your home, your car, holiday home or anywhere in the world that you may have activated your subscription to Orb Networks. Meantime, the DRM keeps track of usage and any access outside the agreement gets billed to your account or blocked.

Take the DVD out of the box and the scrambled data on the drive is no longer accessible, though you are free to walk next door and put the disc into your neighbour’s conventional DVD player.

It is a vision of the future that might just get some of the brightest minds in the entertainment industry to pull their finger out!


Formerly Managing Director of top DVD authoring house Electric Switch, Bob Auger is now head of UK-based DVD consultancy Newmérique and is currently working on a number of projects, including the use of DVD for educational purposes. bob@newmerique.com
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