Pocket Change - Shopping Blog

On TiVo’s home screen there’s always a little item at the bottom exhorting me to “See the new Chevy Testosterone!” or “Learn the secret that been allowing Celine Dion to perform despite having been a formaldehyde-filled corpse since 1998!” or some such marketing tie-in. I’ve always ignored them, to the point where I hardly see them anymore. But the other day, I actually had to watch. It said “check out the video from MC Lars.”

MC Lars? I kind of know that dude, sort of vaguely! What’s he doing on my TiVo? Well, I’m still not entirely sure WHY he was on my TiVo, but the video was interesting. It’s called Download This Song, and it’s all about how the record industry should grow up, quit suing its customers and basically get its head out of 1982. Clever lyrics and a well-produced video, even if the melody makes me want to track down and murder Blink-182.

But the most interesting thing here was that TiVo chose to feature such an anti-corporate song on its front screen. On the one hand, TiVo is all about liberating the consumer from the drudgery of an outdated business model (and charging you a pretty monthly penny for it)–on the other, when you try to do something simple like transfer the video off of the box and onto your iPod, you find yourself encountering the same onerous DRM restrictions that MC Lars is skewering. TiVo has even gotten caught testing a feature that auto-deletes specific shows from consumers boxes after a certain amount of time–kind of like if Sony broke into your house and erased your videotapes.

So what’s the deal here? I suspect that this is simply TiVo’s lame bureaucratic left hand not knowing what its cool, nerdcore, content-must-be-free right hand is doing, but I’d happily entertain idle speculations of a shift in corporate philosophy, mutiny or robot revolt. (I’ll always entertain suggestions of robot revolt. Seriously, people: we need to prepare ourselves.)

Aram