Restrictions set by Broadcaster…deja vu

If you remember what happened last month, there was a rather large fiasco caused by NBC for Vista Media Center users, where nobody running the operating system was able to record American Gladiators. Both NBC & Microsoft were quick to comment that the message was caused due to an error, and was completely unintentional. Microsoft respects the copy-protection flags of broadcasters, but if it’s a flag issue, and no TiVo users had the problem, why did Media Center users?

While that never did reach a conclusion really, most people were satisfied by the fact that future recordings were able to record properly. That is, until tonight when I was greeted by this familiar, and very unwelcome message:

To be completely fair, this problem doesn’t seem to be as major as before since some colleagues were able to record via their analog tuners. But I can confirm, that running Cable Cards with Comcast San Jose, I did experience the message & thus American Gladiators did not record. Now I won’t know if Crush continues her pugilistic dominance 🙂
 
I can joke, since it was after all just American Gladiators…but I can’t begin to even think if I came home to this message for the UEFA Cup Semi-Finals this week, or the NBA Finals. With all the terrible publicity which Vista itself has received, and not even adding to that the non-stop issues & reputation regarding Cable Card, I’d be quite disheartened to hear that the problem was not just an isolated occurrence, but will be more frequent for Cable Card users.

There’s no excuse for a person to spend $1500 on a cable card system to then be told they cannot record content which is available for FREE without ANY protection with a $5 Over-the-Air antenna. I hope that’s not the case, but in the meantime, I’m left watching something NOT called American Gladiators due to this.