I copied some episodes of MAverick from the ATT DVR to my Magnavox DVD-HD recorder. They copied to the hard drive, but upon trying to burn them to a DVD, I discovered them to be copy protected. Is it Encore or ATT that protects them? Why would they copy to another HD DVR but not a DVD?
Some channels require the provider to use conditional access and digital rights management software and others don’t. However, AT&T uses Microsoft Media Room as its middleware platform and MS Media Room just goes ahead and applies digital rights management to all channels.
AT&T U-Verse uses a technology called IPTV. IPTV uses the IP protocol to send the video stream to your set top box. The video content owners were very skeptical of this technology when it first started because of the “IP” in it’s name. They were worried about what happened to the recording industry when MP3s allowed users to make digital copies of music. It really doesn’t correlate because even though this technology uses Internet Protocol (IP) it is a closed system and the content never travels over the Internet. But the industry was worried about the issue enough that content providers started requiring an IP rider to their carriage contracts. In many cases, digital rights management was required to obtain the IP rights in the contract.
Even though you said you could copy the content to a second DVR, could you view it on the second DVR?
Yes.