The Obama administration came down on the side of consumers, television viewers and the very future of Video on Demand Friday when it decided to recommend that the Supreme Court not take the case of Cartoon Networks v. CSC Holdings. Like all legal discussions, this one is hairy and boring and mired in fancy lawyer talk, but as I understand it, the Cartoon Network(s) was suing Cablevision for copyright violations due to its DVR system. What is different about this system from your in-home TiVo is that the Cablevision system operated from a central server. The technical mumbo-jumbo combined with lawyerspeak went something like: the Cablevision system merely copied digital content that was already flowing around the RAM and cables and processors, so saving it to a hard disk was only different in form, not in actual effect or spirit or anything real.

The counter argument from the Cartoon Networks (and basically all of the corporate giants in Hollywood) was that, uh, this was, erm, illegal, because, ah... sorry. I don't have much sympathy for their argument and can't really tell you what it is because it doesn't make sense. Something about the copy being at Cablevision instead of in the home, so the argument was something along the lines of how citizens have a right to make personal copies to audio cassette tape (Remember how the industry fought that tooth-n-nail in the 1970s?) or VHS tape (Remember how the industry fought that tooth-n-nail in the 1980s?) or TiVo (Remember how the industry fought that tooth-n-nail in the 1990s?), but individual consumers storing a program on their cable-provider's central server is a violation. Whatever.

So, yea, hooray for progress and sensible copyright law and consumer rights and all that, but I think this story is a little bigger than what is being reported in the media. Think about it: Cablevision stores program content on a central server. This happens at the user's request when Dean presses the record button on his cable box or schedules a recording. What's neat about this is that when other users want to watch Sunday's episode of The Venture Bros. (which is hysterical, by the way - but definitely for adults), they could also watch Dean's recording. Hmm, what if the technology existed such that an entire day of programming could be stored on a central server? What would television look like if you could just watch whatever program you wanted, whenever you wanted to (after its release, of course)?

Now, granted, that's the future, because even at 5¢/GB for HDD storage, a day's programming takes up too much space and is too expensive. So in the interum, what about a smart system that only saved new programming, plus what users selected on demand? For example, if you look at the daily schedule of any particular cable channel, you'll notice that most that produce actual pre-recorded shows only have four hours of new content a day. More traditional channels have a lot more programming in the form of talk shows (morning/night), news and whatnot, but even then, there's a lot of repeated content, especially now that we are into summer reruns. Furthermore, with the on-demand part, there's certainly tons of programming no one is watching. I mean, there's no need to save four hours of MTV not playing music videos, two hours of some obscure author chatting away on C-SPAN or three hours of a 15 year old Big Ten football game on ESPN if no one is watching, right? But with the on-demand system, if a subscriber clicked on the 2 A.M. re-broadcast of Handel's Giulio Cesare on PBS, bam, it'd be available to everyone. (Incidentally, that's a sceenie from that opera at the beginning of the article - looks more interesting than you thought, huh?)

Other than the aforementioned army of corporate Hollywood lawyers, is there any person on the planet that does not see this coming? Seems to me it's time for the industry to stop wasting resources fighting the future in court and spend a little more time figuring out how to make a bajillion dollars selling their content. I know I'd pay good money to watch any program I wanted whenever I wanted. Wouldn't you?

References:
- Obama Administration Sides With Technology Over Hollywood In Cablevision Case