Why are people around the blogosphere buying this nonsense?
Jim Denney, director of product marketing for TiVo, said the instances of standard TV shows being affected by new copy protection restrictions likely are “false positives.”
Denney said the copy protection is trigged by a flag in the video signal. The reports appearing on the Web appear to be cases where TiVo misinterprets noise in the signal as a copy protection flag, and imposes the restrictions.
“During the test process, we came across people who had false positives because of noisy analog signals,” he said. “We actually delayed development (of the new TiVo software) to address those false positives.”
[Update: I got this part wrong — but see note below.] Why not just blame solar flares? Hey, I know, maybe it was hackers!
“Noisy analog signals” don’t have a publicist, so they can’t stick up for themselves. Let’s just let Occam’s Razor stand up for them instead. If the signal was so garbled, how can the program listing show perfect text for pages, instead of garbage? Aren’t we talking about reception of a single bit of data (flag on or off) — is that really so hard to receive through that noisy analog signal? Doesn’t it seem a lot more likely that some overzealous scheduler clicked a “protect content” checkbox without realizing the storm it would cause?
The basic question is why TiVo is implementing these crap features. But if you want to live with the features, the next question is, who has access to the flag controls? If someone inside TiVo flipped the flag on, for whatever reason, TiVo should say that now. If the broadcaster — through the analog signal being named as the fall guy by Mr. Denney — can turn the flag on whenever they want, the power of this feature is in the wrong hands altogether. The only place TiVo should have ever allowed this flag to be set is in the schedule data they provide, which is only analog in that some users get it through their phone lines (apparently not a problem for getting the “King of the Hill” title to the TiVo error-free). Given that TiVo is trying to blame a “bug” for their publicity blow-up, I’m guessing it wasn’t a TiVo employee that set the flag. And that makes a terrible feature even worse.
TiVo is selling crap. And they’re explaining their bad decisions with even more crap. Don’t buy it, and don’t let them spread their “bug” explanation any further.
Update: As several commenters pointed out, my questions about the analog transmission of the copy protection flag were more skeptical than they should have been. TiVo does, in fact, delete content from its customers’ property based on signals that can be sent out by any broadcaster, and does not regulate the use of this destructive feature through centralized control in their offices. (Glad I invoked Occam’s Razor, which says the simplest explanation is usually correct!)
What nearly all of the commenters seem to have missed, though, is that this does make the feature worse than originally reported. Why are you guys so happy to point out that TiVo has handed a remote delete capability to a wide variety of other companies? Why are you so vehement that a faulty analog signal deleting data from my hard drive is a perfectly reasonable explanation? I have a really hard time believing that anyone who doesn’t work for TiVo (or Macrovision) directly would support those arguments if they thought them through. If Microsoft Word starting deleting documents from my hard drive should it find that they contained too-extensive quotes from copyrighted material, would that somehow be okay as long as the “delete” signal were analog? I stand by my “come on” and the tags on this post — it’s ridiculous that TiVo is hand-waving about noisy analog signals as though a simple bug sufficiently explains their, or any PVR manufacturer’s, decision to interpret any television signal as a good reason to delete data from my hard drive. That sounds much more like The Outer Limits than it does “Television My Way.”