Technological Determinism, VoIP and Video

Time Warner Cable once pondered offering a network-based digital video recorder service called "Mystro." Time Warner decided against introducing the service after legal threats from the broadcast industry. Cablevision Systems Corp. also tried to introduce a similar service before running into a content industry buzz saw.

Comcast now is testing a less-ambitious service like the "Start Over" service Time Warner now offers, allowing users to start a program at the beginning in case they missed the start.

At a recent industry meeting, a question arose: Where is the logical place to put such technology? Should it be in a consumer, edge of the network device or "in the cloud"? From a pure technology perspective, one might reasonably argue such functionality should be "in the network."

Of course, that is a technology answer. The problem is that rights holders fear such a move would damage their control over content and ad revenue attached to that content. In principle, one could strip out the original advertising inserted into a "live" stream and replace it with other advertising sold by the network distributor, not the program originator.

In similar fashion, another question arose at a separate "voice peering" panel about why proponents were spending so much time focusing on voice peering rather than other sorts of application peering or bandwidth.

Legitimate questions both. There is a place where advanced technology intersects with copyright law, national or local taxation regimes, rights of way issues, consumer protection laws and conflicting bodies of law governing voice communications, radio, TV, newspapers and data communications.

Technology enables us to cross many of those old boundaries. What technology does not allow us to do is transcend the legal, regulatory and tax laws that come attached to services, applications and activities. And that is the rub.

There are many things we can do. There are many things we want to do. The problem is that some of these things can only be done in certain ways without running afoul of laws, regulations or business models built on the existence of those rules.

It gets us only so far to say the rules increasingly are illogical in a genuine sense. Some of the rules might change over time. Others might simply have to be endured. The point is that simple logic and technological capability sometimes do not trump legacy ways of doing things.