Let the Media Download Battle Begin

Buy an ad on DigitalJournal.com

Timing is everything and with the emerging video technology available today, the major players want in on the sales. This week the popular TiVo television recording devices became available in Canada, which facilitates the download of TV shows on a hard drive, a medium that many now use to store their video media, in the age of Personal Video Recording technology and Internet downloads.

But the choice just got more complicated as Apple and Microsoft have rushed to join in the competition to provide media downloads to the Canadian market.

Just a few days ago Microsoft made movies available for download in Canada via their Xbox Live console.

Apple announced today that popular Television series are now available at their iTunes store for $1.99 each.

Some of the shows available for download include Little Mosque on the Prairie, The Rick Mercer Report, Corner Gas, NHL hockey games, Dragon's Den, Degrassi, Drawn Together, Instant Star, South Park, The Sarah Silverman Program and The Hills.

As CBC reported, Peter Lowe who is the Director of marketing for iTunes Canada, tried to explain the media rights situation in the emerging market "It's complicated because different networks and production companies have rights to content in different places around the world and you ultimately have to work with the person who owns the content to deliver it," he said. "Unfortunately, there is no one rule that you can apply."

Industry analysts predict that the pay-per download model may not take off in Canada, due to the complex licensing and the resulting poor selection. Right now the limited offerings by both Microsoft and Apple may reflect the rush to deliver the product to the market, but consumers may hope for a better selection in the future. Lowe remains optimistic, saying that Apple will strive towards releasing content in a matter of months and weeks, not years. However in a Globe and Mail report on the subject, he was quoted as saying "There are a lot of rights and licenses that have to be cleared and in effect, business relationships that have to be put in place, and then of course content that has to be encoded and put on servers and technology deployed to make that available to customers."

Canadian networks pay a great deal of money for the broadcast rights to top level programs, such as House, CSI and Grey's Anatomy and may be nervous about selling off some of the rights to a iTunes for fear of taking viewers away from their own nightly programming.

Aside from blackouts to U.S. content for missed episodes of favourite shows that Canadians have to put up and this licensing scheme that may hamper the legal process, the upcoming Digital Copyright legislation that the Conservative government wants to table could make the playing field interesting. It may do little to stop the illegal downloads of favourite movies and TV shows, but it could put major restrictions on what consumers can do with the content that they've downloaded, even when it's been paid for. There is also the current Writers Guild of America strike and their complaints over New Media royalties, which includes both video rental and downloads. How this all plays out could be an interesting cascade of events, hopefully resulting in a good selection of entertainment media for Canadians to choose from.