# Cablevision wins appeal on Remote Storage DVR



## thumperr

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121786446764010227.html?mod=2_1571_leftbox

quote
In a move that could have important consequences for cable and satellite distributors and programmers, a federal appeals court threw out a lower court's decision that blocked Cablevision Systems Corp. from introducing a next-generation digital video recorder.

The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals found in an order Monday that a district judge erred in ruling last year that Cablevision's plans to introduce a remote-storage DVR system would violate copyright laws.


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## jefbal99

Any free source with the full text of the article?


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## geoff

jefbal99 said:


> Any free source with the full text of the article?


Different article:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/pos...ns-on-appeal-remote-dvr-lawful-after-all.html

Court Decision:

http://www.ca2.uscourts.gov:8080/is....uscourts.gov:8080/isysquery/irl48eb/1/hilite

Geoff


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## bjamin82

jefbal99 said:


> Any free source with the full text of the article?


http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10006580-93.html


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## dbmaven

This may not be completely over just yet:


> The appeals court, in a written ruling, also said it was sending the case back to the U.S. District Court in New York for further proceedings.


Seen here at Yahoo News

The NY District Court will no doubt review the case, the objections of the Federal Appeals Court, and may place restrictions on the use of a 'network DVR' technology, even if it is ultimately allowed to reach market.


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## bhelton71

So this is sort of a new concept I guess - Remote Storage DVR. What exactly does that mean ? Sounds like you have an allocated storage area - lets say 400GB just for fun. And this is accessed through internet or coax (some sort of bidirectional deal ?) or how ? And could one go to an aunts house and pull up the DVR or is it tied to a physical address somehow ? Just curious if anyone knows any details ?


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## MIKE0616

bhelton71 said:


> So this is sort of a new concept I guess - Remote Storage DVR. What exactly does that mean ? Sounds like you have an allocated storage area - lets say 400GB just for fun. And this is accessed through internet or coax (some sort of bidirectional deal ?) or how ? And could one go to an aunts house and pull up the DVR or is it tied to a physical address somehow ? Just curious if anyone knows any details ?


From the news bites and articles on-line I could find about it, it looks like CableVision is essentially wanting to have "set-top boxes" that will ACT like DVRs, but are really just "set-top boxes." That would allow them, the way I read it, to be out of the DVR business and everything would essentially be VOD. That doesn't seem like anything special for the consumer, only should cut CableVision's costs while the rates will stay the same and profits will go up. 

Anyone else reading it the same way or am I way off base? It seems more like a bunch of stand-alone computers VS. a network or a mainframe, reduced cost per user.


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## TBoneit

I'll bet that the remote response will be slow as the key press for FF or Play or Slo-Mo will have to be sent back to the central DVR location and then it will do what you requested on the stream as it is sent to you. I could see it being almost decent in the middle of the night and darned slow during peak hours.

Just for comparison I had a Cablevision box a little while ago, a non-DVR box. However it had DVR functions for on Demand shows. Very unresponsive and damn nigh useless. 

This would also have to be tied into switched video somehow as it would require every box to have a dedicated feed when the DVR feature was in use. Always?? Would they be buffering it for you so you could always skip back? 

Color me not interested.


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## Elephanthead

I think your all missing the point, the central server will contain every channels feed recorded, you will be able to watch any show, anytime. You won't need to tell it to record anything, it will record everything. You only need to tell it what you want to watch.


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## elbodude

Elephanthead said:


> I think your all missing the point, the central server will contain every channels feed recorded, you will be able to watch any show, anytime. You won't need to tell it to record anything, it will record everything. You only need to tell it what you want to watch.


I also heard they would disable the ability to skip commercials on certain shows.


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## inkahauts

I think this just paves the way for building slingbox like capabilities into DVR's and making them accessible to your own person laptops through the internet...


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## HDlover

This is the future of cable TV and advertisers who hate DVRs. You will not be able to skip commercials but they will only be about 15 seconds long ALA the internet. Eventually they will only be an internet provider. DVRs cannot continue, would you pay for an advertisement no one is watching?


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## lromoda

Has there been any kind of study as to percentage of people who actually commercial skip? I know all of us on the forum do but were not a representative slice of America, now are we....


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## scooper

Actually - I only commercial skip if I'm watching recorded material. If I'm watching live - if we skip back to catch something, then we will commercial skip to catchup to live again.


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## Drew2k

Discussion in the DIRECTV forum as well: Cablevision wins head-end DVR appeal


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## phrelin

OK, nobody seems to understand this, so I'm going to explain how it could work.

1. Customers are assigned an average of (you fill it in, 500GB, 2TB?) of storage.

2. Customer 124356 tells the system he/she wants from Monday night's 8 pm prime time slot _Terminator, Chuck, Big Bang Theory, Gossip Girl and Dancing With The Stars_ recorded while the two members of the family watch _Dancing with the Stars_ live in HD in the home theater room so they can vote.

3. Cable company directs a copy of each show from the local channel feed to the customers storage area.

4. Mom, who's working swing shift at Denny's comes home and watches _Dancing with the Stars_ in the kitchen in HD to unwind. Then sometime later, one member of the family watches _Gossip Girl_ in HD in bedroom A while another is watching _Big Bang Theory_ in HD in bedroom B. Several members of the family at different days and times watch _Terminator_ and _Chuck_ in HD in bedroom C and the home office respectively.

That's five shows shown in the 8 pm time slot on Monday. To record those 5 shows and distribute them around the 6 rooms indicated the cable company provides 6 receivers that access the storage in much the same fashion they access the VOD.

At this time, Dish and DirecTV customers would go bonkers trying to accomplish this. But DirecTV customers could. Dish Network does everything in it's power to keep you from having the capacity to do this, but will allow it at a huge cost.

I think that the "centralized network DVR" shouldn't be dismissed by anyone at Dish Network even if we need to wait for a Supreme Court decision. Consider this from Multichannel News:


> Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt said that his company would roll out a network DVR product if the courts allow it.
> 
> On a conference call with analyst to discuss its second-quarter results, Britt said that the network DVR, championed by Cablevision Systems, is a more elegant engineering solution.
> 
> "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," Britt said. "If this particular court case is upheld, we will deploy that."


Congratulations to the DirecTV forum members for discussing this intelligently. I'm afraid Dish forum members tend to think like Charlie - they want to fiddle with troublesome hardware. Most of the millions of customers out there would love to get rid of that hardware.


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## scooper

I like the idea, but I'm afraid it wouldn't be practical for DBS. About the closest you could come would be a large storage central DVR (with 3-6 tuners ?) with satellite network boxes.


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## TBoneit

The two problems I see with a centralized DVR from the cable company is latency to remote commands and how well would it work with the switched video systems they are using to conserve bandwidth?

The reason I see giving so much capacity to an account is, if they had to store a program until everybody deleted it from their DVR by using one big VOD type of server they'd be storing things forever. Whereas if they give each account 500Gb then it becomes manageable. 

Notice I suspect that it will be so much storage per account not per box such as the DVRs we have do now. So someone with 6 traditional DVRs would most likely have a lot more storage than a cable company with one storage per account.

Pluses for that = view recorded media on any box in the house easily. 
Minuses = Anybody could in theory delete something someone else wanted to save.

Cheers


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## phrelin

They can't do other than have dedicated storage by account. In an analysis of the Appeals Court decision from the LA Times:


> Nor did Cablevision violate copyrights by saving full programs in users' dedicated storage spaces, the panel decided, because the copying was really being done by the users -- Cablevision's "RS-DVR" machines were merely obeying the customers' electronic orders.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> In the case of a VCR, it seems clear -- and we know of no case holding otherwise -- that the operator of the VCR, the person who actually presses the button to make the recording, supplies the necessary element of volition, not the person who manufactures, maintains, or, if distinct from the operator, owns the machine. We do not believe that a RS-DVR customer is sufficiently distinguishable from a VCR user to impose liability as a direct infringer on a different party for copies that are made automatically upon that customer's command.
> 
> 
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> The key here, the court said, is that the Cablevision system is automated. It's like a photocopy shop that lets users make their own copies, rather than Xeroxing books at their request. Finally, the panel ruled that playing back recordings didn't amount to publicly performing a work. Although the service was available to the public, each recording could be seen only by one household.
> 
> 
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> Because each RS-DVR playback transmission is made to a single subscriber using a single unique copy produced by that subscriber, we conclude that such transmissions are not performances "to the public" and therefore do not infringe any exclusive right of public performance.
> 
> Click to expand...
Click to expand...


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## kw2957

This sounds pretty cool, but I can't help but be worried about future restrictions on DVRs, like ones we're already beginning to see.


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## lee635

I think it's going to come down to personal preferance and customer acceptance. Look at answering machines. In big business, it's all about centralized voice mail, but in the conusmer space, answering machines are king. Another analog might be email. Some folks like to store their emails on their local hard drive, others like to use gmail or yahoo mail.

Both solutions have pros and cons. I think that years from now either solution will work well. Look at it this way, our children's dish network box will come with an incredibly stable, incredibly large video storage at a very low cost. Alternatively, our children's cable service will offer centralized video replay with lightning fast response time, mega storage and so forth.

Here's something for the satellite providers: If they put the storage device on the satellite out in space, they could reduce the latency by about half. We're all going to end up with two-way satellite dishes eventually. Just trying to think long term and out of the box here.


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