On his Blog Maverick site, Mark Cuban addresses the illogic behind opposition of the DVR by big media companies like Viacom and Disney.

For some reason they want to kill off the DVR… Do you not realize that the DVR is the one device that can save all things traditional and holy to your business and stock price?… Let me ask a simple question, if everyone had a DVR that could record any and every series they liked, enabling them to watch the shows they missed immediately, why would they go to Hulu ever again?

When new technologies come along and change the marketplace, the gut reaction of most established companies seems to be, “How can we block this new idea?” As I heard at a panel last night, “water is wet.”

For indie film companies with few resources, the challenge is to see the DVRs, the customer-friendly opportunities that are already emerging. A few companiesare innovating with VOD but have any really taken advantage of the new ways people are watching things from a marketing perspective? What about the technology that is already emerging is worth embracing rather than trying to send takedown after takedown to rapidshare sites? Will there be a technology, like satellite distribution, that makes theatrical super cheap? Or will there be a way to find out about and schedule the films, like theatrical TiVO?

Today, thanks to BuisnessofVideo.com I attended the eMERGING MEDIA FORUM, a day-long conference presented by BMO Capital Markets and featuring talks from CEOs of such internet media and tech companies as BitGravity, BitTorrent, TiVo, GridNetworks, and MLB.com. Though I anticipated Doug Walker from BitTorrent would be the most interesting to indie filmmakers, as it turned out, it was Tom Rogers from TiVo who really stole the show (and not just because he began his talk with a five minute Simpsons clip).

Most of the presenters had the same basic message- give the consumers what they want, and what we think they want is media on demand, across any platform, in high quality, quickly, easily, and then somehow make money off it. TiVo seems to have one of the better plans to achieve this end- they are partnered with a cable company, Comcast, so they can get to the existing consumer base. They are putting R&D into the concept of being “the Google of TV”- i.e. through their infrastructure, you would be able to look both at television programs that are available and find available video on the web- they are already partnering with a bunch of online video sites including YouTube.

TiVo also is working on another key customer desire- universality. One set-top box, one remote- no “partial solutions”. Rogers argues that the television is still second only to the car as a major household purchase for Americans, and with new HD models getting bigger, flatter, and cheaper this will only continue.

Naturally the most fascinating thing about TiVo is that much of its appeal to consumers is its ability to enable “commercial avoidance.” Television was basically invented to frame commercials- it’s a little strange to think people can continue to be entertained in quite same effective way without them. TiVo offers companies “solutions” based on the metrics they have discovered by studying people using their product to fast forward ads.

For indie filmmakers, the issue of advertising is not quite the same, but the mechanism for getting films to viewers matters- and TiVo is not a bad bet.

Also: thanks to Steve Freitas at BMO for the hook-up.