It sounds like a bad horror movie, doesn’t it? According to Edward Jay Epstein in Slate, Rupert Murdoch has a plan to give away 20 million DVRs to DirecTV subscribers. The satellite-based service would download HDTV-quality movies, in encrypted format, onto subscribers’ hard drives in the middle of the night. The HDTV movies would be higher quality than DVDs, and you wouldn’t have to hassle with returning the physical product to the store, thus making DVD-rental services onsolete. The problem, apparently, is that Wal-Mart, the biggest seller of DVDs in the world, has negotiated a 45-day window of exclusivity with all the major movie studios. During that period, no movie can be delivered electronically.
It’s an intriguing story, well worth reading (as is this commentary on PVRBlog). But one sentence caught my eye:
One idea now under consideration at DirecTV is to provide these DVRs with an enormous 160-gigabyte recording capacity. The subscriber would only be told about 80 gigabytes, with the remaining 80 gigabytes reserved for encrypted movies.
Um, 160 GB is “enormous”? Tell that to a PVR fanatic and you’ll get uncontrollable laughter. The 160 GB drive in my Scientific Atlanta 8300HD holds about 25 hours of content, which isn’t all that much. Cut it in half (by hiding half the drive) and you’re giving me a PVR that can only hold 12 hours of the content I choose. I added a 300GB drive to the 8300HD and that’s about right.
As for the battle between Murdoch and Wal-Mart, well, I feel about the same with this one as I did watching Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster. Let them pummel each other into the ground, and the world will be a better place.
Ed Bott 