Kiosk/Download Stations (2) are located in public places, such as retail establishments, malls, and so forth, for providing customers who own or newly purchase portable audio and/or audio/visual playback/recording devices (8) to be provided a service for rapidly downloading from the Kiosk (2) into a given device (8) newly purchased program material and/or previously purchased program material of the associated customer, the Kiosk (2) encoding the program material in a manner to only permit the customer to produce a backup copy by uploading the program material into the customer's PC (12), and only download the program material from the PC (12) into the customer's single device (8), while preventing any other copying of the program material from either the customer's device (8) or PC (12).