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The U.S. Court of Appeals for New York last week made a ruling that could have a huge impact on how viewers watch television.
The court overturned a ruling that had blocked Cablevision - and, by extension, other cable providers - from making use of a so-called network DVR that would run from a single location rather than from individual DVRs in each subscriber’s home, writes AdAge. Consumers using such a network DVR would be able to record programs without a set-top box, turning every television in the house into an ad-skipping machine.
About 26 million homes, or 23.4 percent, of TV households had DVRs at the end of the first quarter. Magna estimates that 43.5 million subscribers, or about 37 percent of TV households - will have DVRs by the end of 2012. The court ruling paves the way for a massive increase in the penetration of DVR capabilities.
The ruling may not stand: Turner Broadcasting, 20th Century Fox, CBS, ABC and NBC - the media conglomerates involved in the suit - are expected to appeal.
Some in the industry look at the inherent disruptiveness of nDVR as proving to be a catalyst for the creation of a new, more productive TV ad model. One network executive told Adweek that, while an unwelcome development, the nDVR is simply the latest in a series of threats to the TV ad model. “I’ve never been under the illusion that I was going to wake up one day and the DVR menace was just going to disappear. This just makes the ad-skipping problem even more urgent.”
The Cablevision ruling, which says that an nDVR is possible because Cablevision isn’t liable for copyright infringement if their customers choose the programs the DVR recorded, prompted those invested in the proposed rule about an increase in internet radio royalty fees to ask for an extension - the Cablevision decision which could present a loophole for streaming radio. The Copyright Office has pushed the comment period back from Sept. 2 to Sept. 15, writes Multichannel News.
Royalty payments could have a big impact on free internet music services such as Pandora or Last.fm and on smaller independent, pure-play internet stations.
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