PVR Wire

1. This is absolutely ridiculous! I love my digital PVR and having to pay tax on something else in this already overtaxed country is ludicrous. While we're at it let's tax video recorders, dvd recorders and don't forget cassette recorders.
I don't understand why the entertainment industry refuses to let people enjoy new technology, allowing consumers to use it to their advantage. They don't seem to have a clue and are more concerned about squeezing every last penny from consumers rather than actually offering us something new and generating more revenue from that. Don't they realise that before I bought a PVR I hardly watched any television, now I watch it much more often and i'm sure this is the case with a lot of people who've just discovered PVRs.

Posted at 9:52AM on Jan 19th 2006 by Ben

2. Actually, BECTU, the broadcasting union also wants recording for time-shifting purposes of non-analogue media to be made illegal. They actually have no problem with recording it on VHS from non-digital sources, but a DVD-R from Digital TV so you can watch something perhaps you missed because of work would be the equivalent quality of the high-street DVD release, especially if it were recorded from BBC Digital. Bandits, the lot of them.

Posted at 10:22AM on Jan 19th 2006 by Marc Jones

3. They're not really talking about taxing PVRs - in fact, they quite clearly rule out levies on PVR technology and come out against DRM being used to, say, time limit download availability.

Their argument is that, if PVR manufacturers charge for usage (as Sky does -- £10 per month, or included in the price of a subscription to one of their packages), even for free-to-air programmes, then some of that charge ought to see its way back to the creative people who make the programmes. The reason why they limit their proposal to free-to-air channels is that PVR usage can be taken into account when discussing terms of carriage for channels offered by subscription or as part of a subscription package. (I've blogged about the piece more fully at http://www.matthewman.net/articles/2006/01/20/pact-and-the-pvr ).

The whole of the Pact report seems to me to be a well thought out examination of the changing broadcast marketplace, and is well worth reading in full.

Posted at 9:40AM on Jan 20th 2006 by Scott Matthewman

4. If you read my item again, I didn't say they were planning to tax your PVR. I said "Effectively, they're talking about taxing your PVR."

I also said "I can accept that this might be the case for VOD services....However, it can't possibly be true of a stand-alone PVR that records content in the same way as a traditional VHS recorder.."

The main point here is that producers already make a lot of money from the sale of their content, and with suggestionsl ike this make themselves seem incapable of devising more imaginative ways of generating income other than passing the bill on to subscribers

Their only recourse seems to be dreaming up ways of taxing the technology that enables the playback or recording, which inevitably gets passed on to the end user.

This is exactly what Pact are suggesting: providers should pay a royalty on top of the fees they already pay to broadcast the material. If producers think their products are worth more, they should charge more - or negotiate higher rates with broadcasters.

You'd be kidding yourself if you think that the royalty fee wouldn't be passed on to the user.

Posted at 2:38PM on Jan 20th 2006 by Martin

5. You say: "providers should pay a royalty on top of the fees they already pay to broadcast the material." -- but Pact explicitly restricted their proposal to free-to-air channels: ones that providers do not pay to carry.

Posted at 10:26AM on Jan 21st 2006 by Scott Matthewman