How TiVo and Amazon are working to eradicate disc media
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It has been my theory for a little while that sometime in the near future, we are going to see the downfall of physical discs for watching movies. Check out this and other original content on CNET's blog network.
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More and more resellers of used computer equipment are charging to erase data that may still be left on hard drives.
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Recording companies looking to wring more profits out of music sales are hoping to sell retailers on a new hybrid disc. On one side is standard CD audio; on the other, the enhanced sound, video and other media capabilities of a DVD...
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Two major torrent sites have announced plans to start filtering their search results in an effort to block copyrighted content, and to avoid the need to shut down their services.
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NEW YORK, March 7  - Amazon.com Inc. launched on Wednesday a service that lets users watch video purchased on the Internet and sent to a home television hooked up to a TiVo set-top box.
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The world's biggest electronics firms are working on systems to stop digital content being pirated.
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Digital downloads direct to the living room US TiVo users will soon be able to download films direct to their TiVo box for viewing on their TV, using the Amazon Unbox service.â¦
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Is CBS adequately addressing digital distribution?
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Digital Rights technology built onto some My Book drives restricts users from sharing certain files.
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Movie studios hate it. File-swappers love it. Bram Cohen's blazing-fast P2P software has turned the internet into a universal TiVo. For free video-on-demand, just click here. By Clive Thompson from Wired magazine.
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SEATTLE - Now that digital cameras have overtaken film cameras in sales, users are beginning to encounter a familiar problem -- what to do with the bulging image files and folders filling up computer hard drives?
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Users of TiVo Inc.'s digital video recorders will be able to order movies from Amazon.com Inc. directly from their TVs starting Tuesday.
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Amazon.com Inc. launched on Wednesday  a service that lets users watch video purchased on the Internet  and sent to a home television hooked up to a TiVo set-top box.
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(InfoWorld) - It's an interesting contrast: consumers are fast ditching videotape for DVDs and hard disks, but the people who make TV shows are sticking to tape for some cutting edge applications. When it comes to recording broadcast-quality HDTV, today's optical disc systems just can't spin fast enough to keep up with the video -- but that may be about to change. Current optical disc systems are speed-capped at about 10,000 rpm (revolutions per minute.) Spin them any faster and there's a danger the discs will physically disintegrate in the drive leaving nothing but a pile of sharp plastic splinters and data that is gone forever. And even if they don't break apart the disc can begin to wobble making reliable recording a problem. Engineers at the Science and Technical Research Laboratories (STRL) of Japan's public broadcaster, NHK (Nippon Hoso Kyokai), are working on an optical disc recording system based on consumer Blu-ray Disc technology that can spin as fast as 15,000 rpm without these problems and demonstrated it last week. It's needed because broadcast quality HDTV signals of the type NHK records stream at 250MbpsÂ making a fast-spinning optical disc a necessity. A 1X Blu-ray Disc records at 36Mbps so the new system is equivalent to 7X speed. NHK has gotten around the stress problem by making a flexible disc that is just 0.1 millimeters thick. The disc, which was co-developed with Ricoh, is essentially the recording layer from a Blu-ray Disc without the 1.1 millimeter plastic substrate that is used to give the disc rigidity. It won't break apart at higher speeds but is not rigid enough to be useful in a drive at any speed. To solve this second problem a thick stabilizing plate has been added into the drive. When spun, the disc is kept steady by the stabilizer and can be used up to 15,000 rpm, said Daiichi Koide, an engineer at NHK STRL. The set-up is similar to Hitachi Maxell's Stacked Volumetric Optical Disc (SVOD) that wasÂ introduced in prototype formÂ at last year's Ceatec exhibition in Japan and shown again at Cebit in Germany this year. SVOD packs several 0.1 millimeter thick optical discs into a cartridge and holds them against a stabilizer in the drive to keep them steady while in use. However there is a key difference between the two, said Koide. In the NHK drive the stabilizer doesn't rotate. If it did it would be susceptible to the same stresses that as the discs. The result is that NHK can spin the disc up to 15,000 rpm without any mechanical problems. The system is still under development and there's no word on when it will literally be ready for prime time. NHK envisages cartridges stuffed with a number of the thin discs that can replace videotapes. Â
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Amazon.com Inc. will let customers buy or rent movies and television shows and download them directly to some TiVo Inc. digital video recorders.
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The companies will allow TiVo owners who shop on Amazonâs digital download store to send films and TV shows to their broadband-connected TiVo machines.
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I'm sorry to see that my blog entry on recent controversies over freedom turned into a thread about TiVo. But since TiVo seems to be such a hot button, I would like to address that issue directly. I made the point in the discussion that TiVo did not license its hardware under the GPL (duh, GPL is a software license, after all), or even a GPL-like license.  So all the fuss about what rights you have with respect to TiVo hardware is nonsense.  Sure, you have the right to modify the hardware because you bought it.  But you will void your warranty, and TiVo is under no obligation to provide you with the schematic, BIOS, or anything else to make it easy to modify the hardware.  Having said that, let's cut through all the posturing about what rights we have, and get to the real issue here, which is what motivated TiVo to use a digital signature, and what would motivate people to modify the TiVo software and run the modified version on a TiVo box.