Cory Doctorow comes to Berkeley, disses DRM
Out of character, I know… ;-)
So I went to Cory’s panel at “Getting Ready for Prime Time: Online Video and the Future of Television” at the Hillside Club. There was a few interesting people, and few whose Dockers seemed too tight. We’ll start with the squares first.
Convergence is crap
Cory’s panel was about 30 minutes late, so when I walked in, I got to listen to some cat talk about the future of TV being in interactive TV and appliance convergence. Call me a jaded twenty-something, but the idea of interactive TV converging with set-top miracles always sets me a-giggling. First, TV is driven by large media companies and large electronics companies. I’ve got quite a bit of their stuff already, and it’s not too good: the DVD player is stuck in widescreen mode–God knows why–and the subwoofer works at odd and inappropriate parts of a movie (”I’ve always loved you!” *dOOOOOOOOm*). The idea that someone will invent a set-top box which will integrate your computer, your receiver, your DVD player, your CD player, your VCR, your TiVo, your music collection (mp3 and plastic both), your downloaded movies, your cable and your HD-TV all together in a singing knot of convergent harmony makes laughable look serious. These ideas are what happens when Time-Warner VPs get stoned. I don’t trust these clowns to make a usable remote control, let alone tie all my media experiences together in something both coherent and useful. Not gonna happen.
Interactive TV = The Intercontinental Zepplin
The other aspect of this, interactive TV, was illustrated with the example of the recent Live 8 concerts: more people watched it online than on TV, and people had fun blogging, chatting, and interacting. So, he asked, why not do this with TV? Using the power of XML and a set-top miracle, give your TV the same interactivity as the internet! Brilliant! Almost as brilliant as the WebTV, only without the benefit of being new. Well, the XML thing. XML makes everything better. I’m all for the XML thing, but a quick question: what will people be using to interact with their new, XML-powered TV? Neural link? Subvocalization? That goddamned remote control? No, probably a keyboard, and some kind of pointer device–maybe a touch pad. Okay, so you’re sitting on the couch with your TV, a set-top box, and a keyboard with a touchpad. And you’re on the internet, watching Def Leppard prance around trying to get the G8 to fix Africa. That seems like a lot of effort to exert in order to make a half-assed duplication of an already-existing technology: the computer.
So we’ve got media appliance convergence, which would be a good idea but will never happen because every player in the business is trying to screw each other over, and the end result are these hobbled, shriveled product-afterbirths. And we’ve got interactive TV, which I interpret to mean “like the internet, only more under our control.” I’ll take a rain check, guys.
Enough about the Dockers crowd.
Cory Doctorow makes sense
I like Cory Doctorow. I like his politics, I like his writing, I like the websites he writes for. I’ll be honest: I really just showed up to hear him toss bons mots and one-liners about DRM. I was not let down. Content companies “have sought injunctive relief against every opportunity presented to them in the past 100 years.” The new WIPO broadcast treaty gives content distributors a 50-year dibs, when their “sole contribution to a work is electromagnetic modulation.”
Snap.
All in all, a decent couple of hours.
I had written a different draft of this post, but opening another tab with Gmail in it killed Firefox. I think I need less extensions.
Leave a comment »
