PVRblog points out that the movie and television industry are fighting against deployment of DVD burners in cable and satellite settop boxes. Since they have already decided that resistance to any sort of DVD recording capability in settop boxes is futile, they are working to cripple any DVD burner that is ultimately included. Matt Haughey wrote:
It really astounds me that Hollywood copyright maximalists never learn from their own mistakes. They railed hard against the VCR, saying it would kill the movie business, and yet today DVD and VHS sales account for a huge chunk of their profit. Now people want to record movies and shows from their TV onto recordable DVD for playback later, and the studios are saying the same thing — that people shouldn’t be allowed to freely record shows. This time they want the playback to be limited to just that DVD drive that recorded it. So if your set-top box dies and you get a new one, or if you move, or change providers, those shows you recorded will be useless.
I think that cable and satellite customers should be free to choose their own DVD burning technology, rather than have to take burners that are embedded in settop boxes that most people only rent. They should be able to choose the features of the DVD burner, so if they want a TiVo user interface they can have it. We should also remember that a small but significant percentage of DVD burner buyers will be re-recording content captured from their own digital video camera, and they should be able to burn region-free DVDs to be used in any way that they wish.
I think that a broadcast flag should be implemented for entertainment programming, but only in such a way that any second-generation copies (meaning a duplicate of what was recorded on your TV) should be prominently marked by the device performing the re-recording. This way, people could make copies for theselves or for a friend or relative, but it would be obvious if programming was resold illegally.
It’s important to remember that the battle we are discussing is taking place over future devices and not those that are on the market today. In terms of DVD burners that work well with existing broadcast technology, units like the Panasonic DMRE50S DVD Player/Recorder are an excellent choice in terms of features and cost.
Although this DVD recorder has some of the features of a Digital Video Recorder like chasing playback (allowing you to watch a recording in progress from the beginning), it doesn’t have a built-in program schedule, like TiVo and ReplayTV units do. This makes units like this a good choice for people who want to use it as a stand-alone recorder or as a component of a larger Home Theater system that already includes a DVR.