Late last month, a U.S. District Court judge handed Cablevision a setback to its planned rollout of a Remote Storage Digital Video Recorder (RS-DVR) service. A group of networks, studios, and programmers had filed suit, claiming that RS-DVR violated their copyrights.

While almost everyone has fast become familiar with the digital video recorder (DVR)—a device that sits in a consumer’s home and digitally records programs for later viewing, much like a VCR—the RS-DVR may be less familiar to some people. A RS-DVR involves the same sort of digital recording, but it occurs at the cable television company’s head-end rather than in the customer’s premise. The alleged copyright violation occurs because the programming is recorded and stored for future use at the head-end by the cable television service provider rather than at the customer’s location.

The advantage to a cable company of deploying a remote storage device is obvious. While a DVR requires an expensive device to be located within a customer’s home, a RS-DVR simply requires the RS-DVR functionality to be available as an additional feature in the standard cable set-top box. This eliminates the existence of an expensive DVR device inside a customer’s home, reducing risk and per-customer equipment investment. It also reduces the number of truck rolls necessary for customers who add DVR to their services; the cable provider simply "turns on" the service for customers with RS-DVR-capable set-top boxes.

The argument about whether or not recorded programming residing at the head-end but dedicated to a specific home differs from that residing at the home itself will be decided in the courts. The first decision favors the content owners, but Cablevision has filed an appeal.

If Cablevision’s appeals fail, the future without RS-DVRs will still be filled with new options and choices for television viewers. The use of in-home DVRs will continue to grow. Indeed, Cablevision will continue to promote its in-home DVRs even as it fights for its right to deploy the RS-DVR.

"On demand" programming will also continue to grow, as it has alongside increasing DVR use. Cable MSOs negotiate with content providers and rights holders for on-demand video content, which is provided to tiers of digital television service subscribers—an increasing amount to all subscribers, with movie networks like HBO and Showtime adding on-demand content to their premium subscribers.

Time Warner Cable, for instance, has seen significant positive response to its "Start Over" product, which allows customers to view from the beginning any program to which they’ve tuned in mid-show. Time Warner Cable has launched "Start Over" in five markets so far. The company cites statistics that two-thirds of its digital subscribers in those markets use "Start Over" each month, and that the average "Start Over" viewer uses the feature six times per month. One feature that endears "Start Over" to the networks is that viewers are unable to fast-forward through commercials while using the feature.

Certainly, while the RS-DVR battle is being fought, the variety of "on demand" program offerings, which require individual negotiations with programmers and networks over the rights fees, will continue to expand. Already, networks are making past episodes of prime-time shows available via their websites, with the commercials embedded in the programs. Obviously, for a fee, they will give cable companies the same sort of access, especially since "on demand" is capable of requiring viewers to watch the commercials within the programs, too. Perhaps the next step in the advancement of "on demand" programming is Time Warner’s development of "Look Back," which will expand "Start Over" by allowing customer to view programs from earlier in the same night. No release date has been announced for "Look Back."