Modern media centers: the hard 20% is socio-​​legal

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Cory Doctorow points out that the first 80% of cre­ating a media center is easy: a decent com­puter (I used an old Pentium III and an old PowerBook, but you can use newer tech if you’re not a poor stu­dent), video out (S-​​Video to an old-​​school TV, VGA or HDMI to a new HDTV), big hard drives, maybe net­work sharing (I used an Airport Extreme I inher­ited) so you can access media from mul­tiple rooms. But what about con­tent — “the other 20 percent”?

Now, onto the other 20 per­cent: the hard stuff. Recording dig­ital TV off-​​air is trivial, but for cable and satel­lite, you’ve got to suck up to the copy-​​protection com­pa­nies whose business-​​model stands between you and enter­tain­ment nir­vana. They don’t want any “user-​​modifiable” stuff in their device chain, which destroys the ele­gant com­modity solu­tion and leaves nothing behind but a bunch of dis­pos­able, crufty, encum­bered set-​​top “appli­ances” that have a thick crust of busi­ness model between you and the TV you’re paying for. These devices want to fire­wall off your per­sonal media and the media you rip from the pre­cious cable/​satellite feeds, and main­tain a locked-​​down path between those stored pro­grams and your other devices. They want to pre­tend that a media server is a mag­ical device, not a gigantic hard-​​disk with a couple AV con­nec­tors on the side.

via What’s Easy, What’s Hard | Share Life & Smile with the Kodak Theatre HD Player.

Doctorow points out that get­ting media con­tent is not a tech­nical chal­lenge. One can pull it through Bittorrent, RapidShare, or sim­ilar gray ser­vices; backup DVDs (pur­chased or rented); use Amazon or iTunes; or record shows off the air (TiVo like). This is all pretty easy, tech­ni­cally. But extending this to a larger scale?

That stuff is hard because it’s not tech­nical, it’s social and legal. It requires a mas­sive change in the thinking of entrenched execs who are bet­ting they can fight the future until retire­ment and leave it all to be someone else’s problem.

I believe we’re cur­rently in tran­si­tion, and old sys­tems are fighting hard to hold on to what they have via legal and social means, such as extending copy­right and suing file sharers. The tech­nical inno­va­tion exists despite (not because of this); when will the social, legal, or busi­ness inno­va­tion permit this inno­va­tion to grow and prosper? Or will the true inno­va­tion actu­ally come when we inte­grate cur­rent socio-​​legal models with the new technology?

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