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SonicBlue Going w/ReplayTV 4000 Despite Lawsuit
Ughhgu writes "Looks like SonicBlue is going to go ahead and start shipping. The Cnet article even has a quote from SonicBlue. It seems they can't understand why the industry would sue them. Sign me up for one!" I'd dearly love to test one of these.
Translation: "Our business model is antiquated, and instead of trying to find a new way we're just going to sue anyone who takes advantage of it." Methinks the networks want immunity from the darwinian aspect of capitalism. As I'm sure has been said on /. before, perhaps it's just time to find a better way.
Read a book! Go hiking! Learn to cook! Become a viking!
Fix that squeaky door hinge. Eat a banana. Buy a Japanese orange. Lay into some sweet ill-nana.
Log onto the web. Shave your head. Watch the tides flow and ebb. Don't be caught dead
watching that damned tv.
Life is waiting.
MP3 players were supposed to be the end of music companies, VCRs were supposed to be the end of movie theatres, Photocopy machines were supposed to be the end of books, Radio was supposed to be the end of newspapers. You know what? None of them created the destruction that people feared they would. This will all blow over like the fears surrounding the RIO.
If you could send a VHS quality video signal over a phone line in real time, everyone would be doing it, and every electronics store would sell "video over phone" boxes.
The bandwidth of a POTS line is less than 4kHz (limited by ADCs and DACs in the central office, which sample 8bits at 8kHz; the effective bandwidth is about 3kHz), whereas an NTSC video signal (broadcast quality) is about 6MHz. You would need 2000 "100% analog" POTS lines to send a video signal. One POTS line would get a full-resolution frame in just over one minute (67 seconds per frame versus 30 frames per second). Remember home video phones and how successful they were?
Even the best compression algorithms and the fastest modems still produce really crappy video over phone lines. DSL gets higher speed by bypassing the ADCs/DACs. Even high speed DSL connections use an effective analog bandwidth of about 1MHz.
What they're really scared of is that with devices like this in the hands of the consumer, the networks' plans for pay-per-view replays go out the window.
What the networks want is to get more money from the consumer by charging for video on demand replays of TV shows. Keep in mind that they're pushing for "locks" on digitally delivered programs so they can mark programs as "unrecordable" and "protected" at which point your VCR/whatever will refuse to record/show the time-shifted broadcast.
The only reason they could want something like this is to be able to charge you for a time-shifted showing.
"Not home for the big game? Well, you can't record it, but we'll let you watch it as video on demand for a small fee! Suck it down!"
With a network of digital recorders that can share programs you no longer have to ask of family and friends, "hey, did you tape ER on thurs.? I missed it and forgot to tape it." Instead you search and download...and if people can do that, why would they buy a rebroadcast from the network?
This isn't about protecting an old and out of date business model, this is about changing current laws and controlling the technology so that a new business model can take off.
This has been repeated ad nauseam, but the media's (Disney, etc.) main concern, as talonyx stated, is the "easy ability to... copy".
Digital is not inherently better than analog, but digital copies are perfect copies. You can make a copy of a copy of a copy, etc. and the 1000th copy is exactly the same as the original. Try doing that with a VCR.
Of course, the TV stations are already broadcasting the original analog data over the air for everyone to see for free. They wouldn't be making much money if they weren't doing this.
Things would kinda suck if everyone had one of these SonicBlue PVRs, since there would be no advertising revenue, so TV would no longer be free.
If you're into hacking, you can add a 10mbps ethernet port to your Tivo, get bash running, and use ExactStream to pull programs off your Tivo, so you can burn them to a CDR.
:), this same show takes up over 9GB of space. I can't imagine trying to send something this large over broadband.
I personally think this whole "Send your friends TV shows over broadband" feature of ReplayTV needs some serious rethinking. At its lowest quality setting, an hour of TV takes up around 1.2GB of disk space on your Tivo. At the best quality (called "Best"
More than likely, ReplayTV is hoping to use this connection so they can push commercials and other promotional video clips to your unit (if you check ReplayTV's website, they say you *must* have broadband and you *must* make your box accessible from the internet - meaning you can't put it behind your firewall or NAT box.)
It seems to me that the media companies are not so much opposed to copying for personal use, perhaps not even copying to share with friends at no profit, but rather are opposed to high quality copies lacking the artifacts that analog devices inherently leave behind when making multi-generation copies.
VHS to VHS ulitimately makes a poorer-quality copy that few people are willing to pay money for (except before release on VHS format). Digital to digital (any form factor) results in perfect copies. People don't have to give up quality for a lower price like they do in analog.
The media companies fear, and I think it is a valid fear, that perfect copies will cut into their profits to a much greater degree than the analog formats of days past.
Where this fear loses its foundation is when you consider that most people who purchase pirated copies of media (digital, analog, software, videos, music, books, whatever) probably would not purchase the item if the (cheap or free) copy was not available.
Put another way, I will never buy a legal copy of Microsoft Office. In my opinion, the quality of the product is not commensurate with its price (I have a legally licensed copy of WordPerfect Office 2000 that I am very happy with). On the other hand, if a copy were made available to me at a low price (read: free), I may consider it. Profits be damned.
But then, it's none of your business how I spend my money, now is it?
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
The banner ad died, we cheered. Then came the pop-under, the flash ad between pages, etc.
Yes, perhaps the idea of putiing commercials into breaks in the programming so that it does not interfere with the content is over. Commercials will be integrated into the program so that it cannot be skipped without skipping the program.
Yes, we now get to see a station badge in the lower right corner, and now we will have a marquee running across our shows too. "Make 7 Up Yours!"
Hammy
Never, because that's not the only difference.
Actually, the biggest difference, in the eyes of the huge media companies, is something that too many Slashdotters tend to dismiss as an invalid argument: you can make perfect copies of digital material, with no loss.
Before anybody dismisses it: try to think like a big media company for a minute. You have rights over works that you've bought or hired people to produce, called "copyrights." They're exclusive, with certain exceptions. (You'd like to forget the exceptions of course, but that's beside the point right now.) One nice thing about the current media formats (a few years ago) is that copies degrade, even without copy protection measures. Books are really hard to copy cheaply (so anyone who does it likely has deep pockets and is quite sueable), and audio and video tapes get noticeably worse with each generation.
If anyone was going to pay for the material in the first place, they'd want a good copy, so they'd get it from your publishers. You can almost forget about the pirates' fair use excuses - nearly no impact on you, right?
So along comes the digital media. It looks and sounds great forever! But...you can copy it! Perfectly! No degradation! All of the sudden, you have a new brand of pirates: the ones that don't have much money. And there are a lot of them, at least potentially, and they're really, really hard to track down.
Now, I'm not saying that all of their actions and arguments are excusable, justified, and sane. I am saying that, at least in this one thing - the difference between analog and digital - they have a good point. It's something more people in the tech crowd should at least acknowledge if they don't want to look like punk 13-year-olds when they argue copyright issues.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
I want some of what you're smoking. Hughes is beaming the signal, at their cost -- and you think it's unreasonable for them to want to get paid for it?
If I mail something to you unsolicited, I can't require that you pay for it, even if you actually want it and decide to keep it.
__
Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
As someone else pointed out in this thread, the legalease on their site states "SONICblue reserves the right to automatically add, modify, or disable any features in the operating software when your ReplayTV 4000 connects to our server."
What I envision happening at some point is a judge declaring that ReplayTV 4000 can only share programs that the networks allow them to, sort of an opt-in for the networks. So technically Sonicblue wouldn't be guilty of false advertising since you can still share *some* programs. At any rate, the disclaimer above seems to cover them removing features as they please.
Here's a question: Instead of trying to STOP progress...Why don't Disney and them just make their own recorder? They could even integrate this into ABC somehow: If you have this specific recorder at this time, you will receave this special bonus footage of whatever instead of a commercial break. Something like that. It seems reasonable to me, and is certainly an improvement over bannig anyhing that could hin the lining of their pockets.
Anyway, just a thought.
Here's what I watch, and why I want a DVR:
Monday: Stargate SG-1
Tuesday: 24
Wednesday: Enterprise, The Amazing Race
Thursday: Survivor
Friday: whatever
Saturday: whatever
Sunday: Stargate SG-1 repeats, Simpsons
Friday and Saturday, there's nothing on. Most other days, there's all of an hour of TV.
There are also TV shows I watch when I'm bored, or nothing else is on, or I'm paging through the channel list and see them, and nothing else is on, or are on every day.
Earth: Final Conflict, Andromeda, Relic Hunter, CounterSpin, the CBC National news.
The thing is, these are really good shows, but are not good enough to justify rearranging my schedule. Likewise with the X-Files, which I just stopped caring about.
If I had a DVR, I would record these TV shows when they were on (during the day, middle of the night, etc); as well I would record movies that were on Movie Central (there are quite a few good movies on this month, but never when I want to watch them, it seems).
After I had them recorded, I could then watch them whenever I wanted. Lazy days off, while working at home, when my favourite shows are pre-empted by hockey games, and so forth.
Ideally, I'd like to be able to convert some things to MPEG-2/DivX and store them long-term, but the vast majority of things I would do this for are CounterSpin (like CrossFire on CNN or HardTalk on BBC, only better), and the national news.
I honestly don't think the CBC, which is largely funded by my tax dollars anyway, would object to me storing news for the long-term. It's not exactly a hot trading item on IRC fservs, and it won't get me any accounts on hotline, to be sure.
Also, I would like to use such a feature to store television shows that I -cannot- buy seasons of on DVD. I'd rather buy a season on DVD than record, encode, and store (on hard drive or via iDVD), but if necessary, I would buy an 80 gig hard drive (or three, and RAID them) to store these episodes.
It would also be nice if they stopped charging so much for the damned DVDs. I mean, they cost me more than VHS tapes and they probably cost about $0.50 to press. Come on, cut me some slack here!
--Dan
The whole point of the box is that you can watch the Simpsons at 4am on Tuesday, and in 22 minutes!
The cool part is that you told the box three months ago to record the Simpsons when available and keep four episodes in storage at all times.