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(Mis)Uses of Technology

by Mike Masnick

Tue, Jun 10th 2003 9:40am





New ReplayTV Strips Controversial Features

from the no-big-surprise dept

In an effort to avoid having to deal with continuing lawsuits, the new owners of ReplayTV, D&M Holdings have announced that the latest version of the product will remove both the "commercial skip" feature, as well as the "send show" feature that let you send a copy of what you recorded to another Replay box over the internet. This isn't really surprising, since both of those features were what the lawsuit against Sonciblue focused on. However, it is a bit unfortunate. It would be difficult to prove that these features are actually illegal (many VCRs currently include "commercial skip"). Also, it wasn't so long ago that Sonicblue had decided to use the commercial skip feature to differentiate themselves, since no one else would add it while the lawsuit was still running. Anyway, this just leaves more room for hobbyists to build their own DVRs that don't have Hollywood-induced restrictions and lets them do what they actually want to do.

3 Comments | Leave a Comment..


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  1.  

    "removed" features

    identicon
    dave, Jun 10th, 2003 @ 11:31am

    could it be that these features will still be there just locked away somewhere? A little hack and it'd bring those features back? Like the APEX DVD players from back in the day when you could hack them to make them region free.

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  2.  

    One feature on Tivo

    identicon
    Ringmaster, Jun 10th, 2003 @ 1:52pm

    While "commerical skipping" is not available on Tivo out of the box, a quick search for Tivo forums on the internet and 4-5 button pushes on the remost later, and this feature is available on most revs of Tivo (including the most recent version). Since the majority of Tivo adoptors are internet savy, this feature is essentially avaialable to the customer base while at the same time getting around potential lawsuits

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  3.  

    Re: One feature on Tivo

    identicon
    Anonymous Coward, Jul 21st, 2003 @ 7:16pm

    This is just a manual 30-second skip initiated by the viewer. The ReplayTV automatically located the start ad end of the commercial and skipped it without viewer intervention.

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]


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