Fergus Cassidy

Protection racket

Apple computers ran a television advertisement a couple of years ago, which ended with the slogan 'Rip. Mix. Burn.'. Jeff Goldblum then announced pleadingly 'It's your music, burn it on a Mac'.

The ad, and Apple, had to soak up some heat for its apparent cavalier attitude to copyright. Michael Eisner, chief executive at Disney, ran up the flag.

He accused the computer industry of considering piracy its new 'killer app' and singled out the Rip Mix Burn ad as an example. He told the US Senate Commerce Committee that the ad suggested to buyers "that they can create a theft if they buy this computer". Heady days and much more to come.

Now Apple have been joined on the accused side of the court by Japanese electronics manufacturer Panasonic. From last June on through to May 2004, the company is running a worldwide television ad campaign for a new DVD recorder. It features film director Oliver Stone. [1]

The ad goes like this: "Panasonic DVD recorders record and play from the same disk at the same time. You control what you record. You control when to watch it. Panasonic DVD recorders put you in the director's chair." Right at the very end, Stone is indeed sitting in a director's chair. He looks to camera and urges: "Don't just play. Record".

Disney at al can now add Panasonic to their list of natural born killers. For that's how the entertainment industry sees anything which threatens the way it currently does business.

The music business tried to make a fight of it, with little success. The writing is now dripping from the wall for the old way of selling music, which hasn't changed since the 1950s.

There are now a number of successful online music sellers and less than a month after Pepsi announced a deal to give away 100m music downloads to its customers from Apple's iTunes service, McDonald's is believed to be negotiating an even bigger deal. More free music comes courtesy of many newspapers.

Recently Billboard magazine reported that almost twice as many singles were bought and downloaded over the net than CD singles from stores in the US. [2]

It looks like the CD single will go the way of the eight-track cartridge. With hundreds of thousands of songs now available to buy and download, it is even being predicted that the whole album concept may be be on its last legs. At a dollar a song, people are going to cherry pick some songs from albums and ignore others, so why bother making albums?

And so on to television and its digital progeny. The last great frontier for traditional media. A relatively safe haven to date because of the extraordinary high bandwidth, which television guzzles faster than closing time on Christmas Eve.

With the music industry choosing to hoist a white flag in preference to the Jolly Roger, the lessons of what happened aren't being lost in television land. The move from analogue to digital will unlock a Pandora's Box of unquantifiable impact.

Oliver Stone's urgings to 'Don't just play. Record' is the television equivalent of Apple's 'Rip. Mix. Burn'. It brings us to the same position music was once in. Only this time, the stakes are unimaginably higher.

The ability to record TV programmes to DVDs would generally only attract the attention of the advertising industry, which would no doubt find a way around the ad skippers. But the existence of the internet as a rival method of distribution has the television industry shivering its timbers.

Once TV programmes are out loose on the net it's little white dot time. A last-mile to go yet - an Irish mile here - but the bandwidth will come. For television, the enemy is not just the internet (that major war is on the way) but all devices that can record and store television's digital signals. And woe betide anything or anything which facilitates that.

The TV companies have too much to lose to capitulate as meekly as the music companies did in the end. This will be a prolonged and bloody fight.

Television's advance troops have been very busy backstage. In recent weeks the industry has cajoled the US regulator into protecting its flanks with the passing into law of what's known as the broadcast flag [3]. This is a piece of digital code embedded at the start of digital television signals. In the regulator's words "the broadcast flag seeks only to prevent mass distribution over the Internet".

The regulations make it illegal to use any equipment that can't recognise the flag. All manufacturers exporting to the US will have to comply. With this measure, the television companies have achieved what the music business only dreamt of. Getting inside the machines and that could provide a lifeline.

The broadcast flag legislation allows the television companies to decide for themselves what programmes they flag. News and current affairs must be exempt, but defining those areas will require a sliderule.

If they don't want viewers to record anything at all they can do just that. This puts the industry in the US back in the saddle more so than before the VCRs arrived.

The broadcast flag creates potentially new platforms for selling digital programmes. It opens up huge possibilities for the first time of charging for individual programmes rather than channels or bundles. There will also be the ability to charge for different levels of recording - keep for 48hrs; one week or forever. Flagging also means that advertisements come bolted on, keeping nine out of ten advertisers happy.

When he launched Telefis Eireann in 1961, Eamon De Valera was scared about the effects of television on people.

My how the tables have turned.

----------------------------------------------------------------
Links

[1] Panasonic press release: 'Matsushita launches global campaign for DVD recorder DIGA featuring renowned filmmaker Oliver Stone'

[2] 'US downloads beat CD sales', article on BBC.co.uk, 3 November 03

[3] FCC press release [pdf 148k]: 'Federal Communications Commission adopts anti-piracy protection for digital TV', 4 November 03.