Betamax rides again! Court OKs "remote storage DVRs," the gateway drug to no DVRs

Brian Stelter is out with the news that an appeals court on Monday ruled in favor of Cablevision in what could be a landmark victory for cable companies wishing to offer customers DVR service without the DVR.

Today's ruling is the latest and greatest affirmation of the wisdom of the 1984 landmark ruling Sony v. Universal City Studios, known as the Betamax case. In that decision, the Supreme Court ruled that making personal copies of TV shows did not violate copyright law. Corporate entertainment lawyers have worked doggedly ever since to take some of the teeth out of that ruling. With Monday's decision, old Betamax just got a new set of teeth.

I wonder, though, if this ironically marks the beginning of the end (years from now) of the DVR.

The ruling (which could still be appealed) is great news for people who have resisted getting a DVR because it would be another black box on top of their TV set. If the ruling stands or is upheld, cable companies will be able to let you record your favorite programs to a server housed at the cable plant. Then you can watch those shows whenever you want with a few clicks of the remote. (The service Cablevision rolled out two years ago, and for which it was sued, costs $9.95 a month; in my market that's what you pay for the box.)

To be sure, Cablevision and other cable companies would love getting that DVR out of your house even more than you would. To you it's an eyesore; to them it's an outlay of capital, about $800 a box, that would plummet to a fraction of that if they could store your videos at their plant, along with thousands of other customers on the same server.

Long term, though, the ruling may be an even bigger deal for cable companies, who might finally feel emboldened to take the remote DVR concept to its logical end — and merge it with their existing video-on-demand (VOD) service. DVRs are easier to use than a Betamax machine ever was, but they are still essentially the same concept: an active recording device that requires consumer initiative. You must set a recording or season pass in order to watch a show. VOD, on the other hand, is passive. TV shows are banked for you to peruse later. That show your friend told you about today, the one that aired yesterday. Given a choice between watching it on a computer screen and your 42-inch plasma TV, which would you choose?

Trouble is, you can't get from a DVR/VOD world to all VOD under existing law. This new court ruling only means that the very specific service offered by Cablevision is legal — a DVR without the DVR — but any variant, such as offering to tape lots of TV shows the consumer didn't request, is still outside the law.

On the other hand, if this service leads to many more people ordering DVR service, that will mean lots more people skipping ads ... this time with the cable company as their enabler. At a certain point, don't you think the networks will throw in the towel and say, "OK, guys, we'll give you all our programs on VOD. Now will you please make the ad breaks non-skippable before we all go broke here?"