DVD as a technology is very tightly controlled. As 3-2-1 Studios, a vendor of DVD copying and backup software discovered, making any innovation in the DVD world without permission from the Hollywood companies (who thought that the VCR and ReplayTV were forms of insitutionalized theft) is an invitation to a punishing lawsuit. Well, who cares, right? After all, DVD is a “success” — lots of people have DVD players.
But DVD players are frozen in amber. The features that the public demands have not been forthcoming — rather, they’ve stayed pretty much at the level that they started out at in the mid-nineties. They got cheaper, but they didn’t get cooler, or weirder, or more flexible.
Case in point: Kaleidescape, a company in Mountain View, has built a “legit” DVD jukebox with permission from Hollywood. This is pretty easy hardware: big-ass hard-drives, some user-interface, and a commodity optical drive. Should be cheap as hell.
It’s not. By the time Kaleidescape pays its license fee to the Hollywood studios and calculates the price it can command without any competition in the field, it ends up fielding a box that holds thirty DVDs on its hard-drive and costs thirty-thousand dollars.
The idea that a 30-movie DVD-ripping jukebox — which I can build “illegally” in my living room for a couple grand — should retail for thirty thousand bucks is revolting. It’s what we, as customers of the CE companies, pay for adopting a technology that is proprietary to the Hollywood companies that take the view that watching movies out of order, skipping commercials, time-shifting and home taping are theft. Shame on us, and what a shame.