Oh, Hollywood — they’re so worried about all of us “consumers” (a synonym for “pirate”) copying their precious content. You know, that stuff that’s hardly worth watching, much less copying.
They envision a world where people are e-mailing and sharing files everywhere, zipping movies around like IMs. Except:
copying shows takes a long time – longer, in fact, than the running time of the shows themselves. At high quality (the second-best of TiVo’s four recording settings), a half-hour show weighs in at 800 megabytes, which takes 50 minutes to copy across a wireless network. (Lower-quality recordings take much less time. So do wired networks.)
And that’s standard television programs, compressed. I don’t think anyone wants to comtemplate how long it would take to transfer, say, a high definition version of a two-hour movie.
