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Tivo/ReplayTV Are To TV What Napster Is To Music?
ContinuousPark writes: "We've talked about hacking the Tivo and, more recently, about ReplayTV boxes being controlled over the Web. Now, the New York Times is taking it a bit further. The interesting point is that while everyone is raving about the new gadgets or complaining about how useless these devices are, the reality is that they are eventually going to disturb the TV industry just as Napster is doing with the music industry. It's just that ReplayTV and Tivo have been very discreet about this, even playing along with the networks. But it will happen and it's going to be a major disruption. I can't wait. Read why." Tivo changed the way I handle TV, but its relatively steep price prevents it from becoming as common as Napster, which is, well, free. Both will alter their industries (and then the industries will converge, but that's another story ;)
As I read the article I saw all the same arguments that people make about banner ads: No one reads them, 99% of them are ignored, if people block them then advertising will work its way into content in a subtle but insidious way, etc. Banner-blocking proponents like to argue that internet advertising is not like TV advertising. Well, it sounds like TV advertising is going to evolve to be exactly like banner ads.
The article crowed about how TiVO could precisely target people based on their likes, lifestyles, and medical conditions. Sending a Preparation H commercial to someone who has hemorrhoids sounds like an incredible invasion of privacy, much more than anything that any banner network is contemplating. Why is there no reaction to this?.
It says that the price that people will pay to watch TV in the future will be that they have to give up information about themselves to the networks who will sell this to advertisers.M
This is far worse than what ad networks are doing -- ad networks are using aggregated information to send users advertising that they may be interested in. And people are so freaked out by this that they are writing banner-blocking software, calling for legislation, etc.
If anyone should be complaining about these TV devices, it should be the privacy advocates. Are you guys out there? Where's the outrage?
Ralph
I've wondered for a while about the possibility of creating an opensource Tivo type of system. After all, it isn't so much the hardware here, any old fast Pentium system with Linux, a video card that has composite or SVHS output and a big HD would be sufficient.
What makes Tivo special though is the software and the tv listing service that you need to subscribe to. I'm sure the software on the end-user side wouldn't be too hard to do, and might even be done better than Tivo or ReplayTV's.
The sticking point is the giant database of TV listings that these devices access in order to know what channel to record, when and for how long. I've thought about using exisiting free services such as TV Guide's or Zap2It's program listings and then using regexp's to convert them into a database but I'm sure that if thousands of geeks started accessing their servers everyday for listings that sooner or later lawsuits would start flying. Is there anyway of obtaining this data legally for free?
One last thought -- TV tuner cards are cheap these days. Why not put three or four in our theoretical opensource Tivo and give the user the option of recording many shows at once? Someone please correct me if I am technologically ignorant on this point.
What does everyone else think about this idea?
That means, by definition, the tools we create can be used to retransmit information. You cannot remove the ability to retransmit information without also removing the ability to receive it. They are one and the same.
We already have ways to interface audio and video to people - no matter how you encrypt or alter the data, the space between the black box and your head is where it's sent unencoded.. perfect for interception.
The RIAA complains that you can create "digitally perfect" copies of a work. But why does that matter? MP3's are a lossful compression scheme. People used audio tape for years before CDs became available. It's obvious the quality is "good enough" for most consumers - that was the state of technology ten years ago.
Who bloody cares how they encrypt it at this point, or what use it is put toward? We're past the point of controlling the media. If the industry wants to go back to using handwritten scrolls then *maybe* it'll have a chance at control.. but as certain religious texts have leaked out despite the church's enormous grip on the world at the time some scrolls were found.. I have my doubts to even that.
Give it up. Take your ball and go home, you're obsolete. You have been for a thousand years.
If you could compress the standard 30-second adverts by a factor of 10, you get the three-second BlipVerts "invented" by George Stone, Rocky Morton, and Annabel Jnakel. Remember the original idea: "BlipVerts happen so fast, they're over and embedded in viewers' minds before they have a chance to channel-switch."
The updated patent filing would read, "BlipVerts happen so fast, they're over and embedded in viewers' minds before they have a chance to fast-forward past them."
Couple that with the research that has been done on driver reaction-time and you can see that editing out commercials on-the-fly would be virtually impossible; indeed, you would need the electronic equivalent of an A/B Roll Editor to get rid of the pesky things. For those shows with a high beer-drinking quotient (like football games, guy), the BlipVerts could extend to six seconds because the alcohol-sotted viewer would need several seconds to find the button, let alone press it enough to make contact. So says the driver-reaction studies over the past 30 or so years.
The movie Max Headroom: 20 Minutes Into the Future (later released to video as Max Headroom, The Original Story) postulated a solution that assumed real-time viewing. Interesting that the same solution would apply to the easy time-shifting that the TiVo and ReplayTV enable.
(To show just how prescient the writers of the original script were, just how soon do you think it will happen that a television network executive will be able to propose this solution to a knotty scheduling war: "We can go porno early.")
In any case, the article states that on a Tivo unit 88% of the commercials go unwatched.
Don't believe everything you read, sparky.
I can't speak for Replay, but TiVo doesn't have a 30 second skip for exactly the reasons you describe. They have a 6-second back, and three fastforward speeds (the fastest is virtually unusable to skip through commercials because you spend more time cuing up to the end of the commercials than if you just used FFW2). The two reasonable fastforward speeds still allow for the impact of the commercial to get through. In fact, as a usability researcher, I can tell you that the average ad has more impact on FFW2 than it does on 'normal' TV because the viewer is intently watching to determine when the show comes back on so they don't overshoot.
I use my TiVo almost exclusively and I can still tell you who all the advertisers are for all my shows, and for 90% of the ads, the brand recognition is more important to the advertiser than the actual patter contained in the commercial.
you're right on one point, though. Widespread TiVo and replayTV use will change the industry, but it's not a disaster. 15 years ago people thought the VCR would mean the end of premium channels like HBO and Showtime. Now everyone has a VCR and yet premium channels still flourish.
The biggest change the VCR had on the industry is the incessant inclusion of tiny station-identification logos in the corner of the screen.
It's not really the end of the world, but with all the press the DeCSS and Napster cases are getting, it's no wonder people are in a hype-happy mood for any sort of digital copying.
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
I love the subhead: It will also spy on you, destroy prime time and shatter the power of the mass market. Is it just impossible for people to accept a new paradigm without thinking that all that preceded it will be destroyed? Movies didn't kill theatrical performances, TV didn't kill movies, the VCR didn't kill broadcast TV, yada yada yada. Or maybe this is just the same mentality that thinks the public is unbelievably stupid, so that after a story that taking an aspirin a day may be good for you, they must warn us that we shouldn't go out and take a hundred.
From the article:
Either the ads will need to become as entertaining as the programs or the programs will need to contain the ads, so that they cannot be stripped out. If Jennifer Aniston wants to remain a Friend, she may need to don a T-shirt that says "Diet Coke."
Believe it. I worked on a hardware/software project which monitored a camera feed at a "sports venue" where we were doing a live broadcast. It would detect a particular advertising sign along the course, and remap it, in real time, with a selected advertisement, and THAT was what was broadcast to the TV viewers.
So, instead of virtualizing the ENTIRE stage/world with live actors, they could use blue-screen-colored products on the set. Then, the producers could acquire and transmit the coordinates (maybe in the vertical blanking interval?) The images to be placed could have been transmitted during prior VBIs.
The broadcasters would encode a default product placement on the broadcast. The TiVo box, knowing the user's preferences, and having access to the product's coordinates, could generate, in real-time, a virtual product to place there, instead.
So, depending on viewer's preferences, Jennifer Aniston 's t-shirt may say "Diet Coke" OR "Budweiser". That said, I doubt it would take long for a /.'er to create their own image files to be mapped.
Advertisers' response will be to eventually switch to a model of product placement in the content itself. It's already a very widespread phenomenon, from all the sports wares hawked in Jerry Maguire, to the number of Pottery Barn mentions in a particular episode of Friends ... And that kind of advertising is much, much harder to edit out.
The thing is, you can make distribution and reediting of this stuff practically free, but production of content will still remain (relatively) costly. If every show looked like South Park, then anybody with a decent computer could put out their own, but most shows require a set, actors, costumes, cameras, crew, etc., etc. Information wants to be free, but not when its production depends on so many atoms.
Francis Hwang
Do domain names matter?
The RIAA doesn't like Napster because it interferes with the revenue stream. Music studios get money when people buy new CDs and don't when they're distributed via Napster.
TV, on the other hand, gets revenue through advertising. Neither ReplayTV nor TiVo chops out commercials, so digitally distributed recordings have the commercials in place. every time it's passed around and watched, the commercials are watched too.
So, all that the TV industry needs to do is find a way to get reasonable metrics on which shows are recorded, and which are being passed around, so they can adjust their estimate of the number of impressions a given show, and consequently the commercials, will be viewed, and incorporate that into the price of advertising for a particular show. In fact, both TiVo and ReplayTV already supply 'number of recordings' metrics to the networks. It wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that the networks are using these figures to adjust the viewership estimates for many shows like X-Files and South Park.
In Canada, for example, the courts have decided that it's okay to redistribute broadcast TV as long as the commercials remain intact. It's not taking money out of anyone's pocket as long as 'recording viewings' are factored into the original advertising and residuals charges.
This is hardly the same thing as copying and distributing purchased CDs.
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox