Electronic device manufacturers and content producers have got to back away from the forest and see the light filtering throught the trees. Consumers want to control the content they purchase and want to be able to use their electronic devices together without restrictions placed on them.

Standards and interoperability will have to come to digital devices, just as Google co-founder Larry Page said in his Consumer Electronics Show keynote speech when he introduced Google Video. Right now, only those video's purchased through Google Video that are NOT copy protected will play on video iPods and Sony PSP's - the rest only work on Google Video.

http://www.google.com/press/podium/ces2006.html

That news about Google Video and Digital Rights Management (DRM) standards of interoperability had me fuming about my inability to use my content (photos, movies, music) on devices made by different manufacturers or between cell phone providers. Today I ran across a story about an Anti-DRM group in Britain campaigning to demand an end to DRM.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/01/18/drm_consumer_opposition/

Obviously I'm not the only one disturbed by the fact that I cannot move digitally recorded movies from my Tivo to my DVD recorder (purchased for exactly that reason, but before I knew it wouldn't work) I only found out that I couldn't record movies from the Tivo to the DVD recorder when I called Pioneer customer support to ask why the recorder wouldn't record my movies. It seems that I can only move digital movies from the Tivo to my computer (which I found I could do with free Tivo Desktop software when I called Tivo customer support.)

So instead of recording directly from my Tivo to my Pioneer DVD recorder, I have to move the movie over to my computer via Tivo Desktop software, then burn a DVD from my computer. Very smart move on Tivo's part, as it means I definitely won't buy the DVR from my satellite TV provider because they don't support skipping commercials, nor do they support moving movies to my computer.

This also means I don't NEED my Pioneer DVD recorder - so their DRM which stops Tivo digitally recorded movies from recording to DVD means that I won't use that Pioneer DVD recorder and will now sell it. The other DVD player connected to my other television will suffice. If I want to record something, it goes on the Tivo because it is so easy to use and works so extremely well. I'll use the free Tivo Desktop software and move it to my computer and burn DVD's of my recorded television and movies there.

Clearly Tivo is doing all they can to make their device consumer friendly - but they are being besieged by television and movie content producers, who are screaming at them to stop the "piracy" of their users. Tivo now disables the 30 second commercial skip button daily (which you have to know how to program - Select, Play, Select, 3-0, Select). They do this via automatically updated internal software because advertisers screamed at them for several years about the consumer ability to skip commercials. The result is that I reprogram that function daily anyway - annoying, but not nearly as annoying as not being able to control my own device the way I want to.

I'm convinced that content producers will lose this battle over the long term and I'll do all I can to fight them myself, like supporting anti-DRM groups wherever I find them. And I'll research more thoroughly before buying products which contain DRM to make certain they will work with my existing devices - meaning no Sony CD's or DVD's. There have been rumors that Apple is creating a set-top box and service similar to Tivo and I'd buy one in a split second as I'm sure I could use my iPod, iMac and iPhoto seamlessly between all devices.

Maybe they'll make a phone with a Mac OS and a PDA as well (I actually used to own an early Apple Newton PDA and oh, how I wish they had continued to develop that wonderful little thing). I'm happy to use anything Apple produces - but I won't switch cell providers or switch my Satellite TV provider. Interoperability and standards are essential to me. It's about choice. Pioneer limited my choices and lost a customer and Motorola lost my ROKR iTunes phone business because the device is only available from Cingular.

Obviously, I'm a Mac user and had studiously avoided purchasing Windows machines until I had to buy a Windows box to run business software not available for my Apple machines. So I bought an extremely cheap $299 PC to run the three programs that won't run on my Mac. That cheap machine now serves as my DVD burner for movies (with a cheap external hard drive as movie storage drive). Pioneer lost a customer because they don't allow me to record movies to DVD from my Tivo. How about a Tivo/Apple partnership? That would be a marriage made in heaven due to the customer-centric design and usability so elegantly addressed by both companies.

I'll put up with Apple's walled garden (iTunes and proprietary AAC files) and their own DRM only as long as everything they make works seamlessly together. Apple products always have worked elegantly together and probably always will. Somehow most third party software seems to interact well with everything else on the Macs. The moment Motorola makes that ROKR iTunes phone available through MY cellular provider, I'll consider buying that phone.

Being in the market for a phone, I had been looking at a Palm Treo 650 phone/PDA and was excited when they introduced the new 700 model, just as I was about to make that purchase. So I read a few reviews and discovered to my horror that Palm just fell victim to the dominance of Microsoft and replaced their own well designed Palm operating system on that new Treo 700 with a buggy, slow and cumbersome Windows OS!

In the process they lost another customer, because I can't stand the clunky way one must navigate with Windows (reviewers agree) and refuse to buy that machine now, the same way I avoided all other PDA's running Windows for the past 10 years. This is all because Palm couldn't port Microsoft documents and Windows related bits to the Palm OS when corporate users required that interoperability. Thanks to Gates & Company, Palm lost another customer - and their own elegant OS.

If mainstream electronics device manufacturers continue to take the path of least resistance by kowtowing to content producers, lowest common denominator software and stifled functionality and interoperability, then consumers will eventually find a way to take back the control. We'll avoid buying products (CD's & DVD's, "rented" music) that don't work with their existing devices (Tivo's, DVD recorders, PDA's, iPods) and will find companies that make all of this stuff work together and buy from them - but only so long as ALL devices and ALL content work with each other interchangeably.