Copyright owners (typified by the Hollywood Studios) have always been rightly concerned about illegal copying and sale of their product.

In the analogue age they could live with the problem. Although you could legitimately buy a VHS copy of a film or could illegitimately tape it from a pay-per-view channel, the quality of any copies you made was strictly limited. In some cases the rights owners deliberately degraded copy quality by adding electronic signatures to the video that don't affect a video recorder when it plays the tape but do interfere with the recording circuitry if you try to make a copy.

Today all content is delivered digitally - video, audio and web - and things are very different. Once you have a digital copy stored on a hard disk it's possible to make an infinite number of copies without any degradation in quality. Visit any new media trade show and every hardware manufacturer will be demonstrating a digital TV set-top box with an enormous hard disc for local storage of video content. However, very few will give you a launch date or a price for the product - the reason is that the Hollywood Studios have "requested" they delay launch until they come up with a business model for local hard disc storage of their content that they are comfortable with.

It's about time the Hollywood Studios took their heads out of the sand and learnt from the Napster experience.

Napster was a web site where consumers could "swap" digital copies of music, just as you or I might swap a CD for a different one with a friend. Naturally Napster turned into a web site where you could download music free of charge and nobody was too worried that the "swapping" was a one way process. Except, of course, the copyright owners who were losing sales of their material. Originally they ignored Napster. Then as it got bigger they had their lawyers write a few stern letters and hoped the problem would go away. Finally when Napster  hit the headlines for reducing CD sales they took legal action to close it down. Rather than preventing the problem from arising in the first place the rights owners waited until it became a major issue and then solved it in the worst possible way. 

And now that Napster is dead and gone Kazaa has taken it's place....

One thing is certain, all of the hardware and software elements already exist for the creation of a video version of Napster:

It's time the Hollywood Studios and other content owners woke up. "Video Napster" is just around the corner, and this time they need to solve the problem before it gets out of hand..

If you think we might be able to help you then take a look at the remaining pages of this site, or simply click the "Contact us" link.