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The Napsterization of TV
Lefty writes "This article in today's Boston Globe talks about the napsterization of TV shows and how the PC as a media server is going to make it happen. Burning TV shows to CD/DVD, e-mailing your friends TV shows, streaming TV over the Internet -- all things the dedicated set-top boxes can't do... The article talks about Snapstream, a PVR competitor to Moxi and ReplayTV, that runs on the PC and has media server capabilities. from the article: "Already you can find a great deal of pirated video material online. If SnapStream gets installed on millions of PCs, there'll be plenty more. And the TV moguls will find themselves knee deep in the digital acid bath.""
The television industry is running scared
By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff, 2/4/2002
Like some universal solvent, digital technology seems to dissolve practically everything it touches.
The music recording moguls learned it the hard way, as consumers swapped favorite tunes on Napster and burned pirate CD recordings. Now it's the TV industry's turn, as the digitizers apply their corrosive talents to copying videos.
You can smell the aroma of panic wafting from the federal courtroom in Los Angeles where some major TV producers filed suit against SonicblueInc. The California company makes Replay TV, a digital video recorder with features that may delight consumers but terrify broadcasters. For instance, the latest version of Replay TV can let the viewer skip over TV commercials without a glance. Moreover, the device allows users to send copies of favorite shows over the Internet.
Scary stuff for any company looking to protect its intellectual property. But even if you think the broadcasters have a point, it's hard to see how their lawsuit will put a stop to this sort of thing. Especially when you consider that millions of personal computers are capable of similar feats.
In essence, Replay TV is a modified personal computer that uses a custom-designed processor to digitize and compress video data and sling it onto a hard drive. Several years ago, when the first such machines were being designed, standard PC processors lacked the muscle to do this work reasonably well. Besides, who'd want to clutter up a PC hard drive with a bunch of old TV shows?
But that was before Pentium 4s and Athlon XPs, monster chips with clock speeds above one gigahertz. The hard drives got bigger as well; you can buy 100 gigabytes for around $300. Then there are the CD burners that are now standard equipment on home PCs. A high-speed burner can copy 800 megabytes of data in just a few minutes.
In short, any late-model PC can double as a Replay TV. All that's needed is a way to pump the TV signal into the computer and the software to digitize and compress it. You can now add both these accessories to a computer for less than $100.
TV tuner cards for computers have been available for at least a decade and generally sell for about $50. The cards connect to a home TV cable or broadcast antenna, and let the user watch TV in an on-screen window, while running other computer tasks in the background.
The last piece of the mosaic fell into place last year, when Houston-based SnapStream Media unveiled its Personal Video Station software for recording TV shows on the PC. SnapStream PVS lets the user punch in time and channel information, then order the computer to copy the show. It's even simpler if the computer is connected to the Internet. The user goes to a Web site that displays local TV listings. Click on the videotape icon next to each show, and the PVS software is set to record the program in Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Media format.
Like the traditional VCR, SnapStream PVS can be confusing to set up and use. But it works. Video quality varies by how much you compress the signal. A half hour of VHS-quality video takes up about 270 megabytes. If your hard drive can stand it, you can make higher-quality copies.
The SnapStream software costs a mere $50 and can be downloaded from the company's Web site, www.snapstream.com. Since most PCs don't have TV tuner cards, SnapStream also peddles a hardware and software bundle in retail stores for $90.
Adding TiVo-like capabilities to a PC allows for a variety of paradigm-busting applications. Say you've got multiple computers in your home, all networked together. The SnapStream software contains a built-in network server, so you can watch a recorded program on any PC in the house. Suppose you own a palm-top computer that runs Microsoft's Pocket PC operating system. You can download a SnapStream video and watch it during the morning commute.
There's just one thing missing - a way to connect the computer to your living room. SnapStream plans to offer just such a device, equipped with WiFi-based wireless networking. In effect, the PC will broadcast programs to the TV.
There's nothing to stop you sharing SnapStream videos over the Internet. Nothing but bandwidth, that is. Most high-speed home Internet services allow rapid downloads, but relatively slow uploads. It'd take all day to send an episode of ''Babylon 5'' at today's speeds. So there's little chance that TV shows will be Napsterized - for now.
But you can certainly burn favorite shows onto CDs and swap them around. Besides, the broadband lines serving universities and businesses are high speed in both directions, and video swappers seem to be using them. Already you can find a great deal of pirated video material online.
If SnapStream gets installed on millions of PCs, there'll be plenty more. And the TV moguls will find themselves knee deep in the digital acid bath.
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
If any one company tries to do this, or uses a centralized server, it'll get shutdown 5,000,000 times faster than Napster.
You can't just "avoid" copyrights.
Jesus, this isn't an article, its an idea that will get annihilated in court!!
I use Snapstream myself.. and I must say that it's one of the greater programs I've used. I think the best part of it has to be the streaming capabilities. Now if only DivX worked for a streaming codec.
This was happening at least 3 years ago when South Park first came on the air. Since my college was too cheap to offer anything that closely resembled cable, I'd have to download them off of any number of sites so I could see that week's episode.
Mind you, I'm sure that's not the first time it happened, this was just my first experience with it.
Has never seen a taco before in his life. I think he is gay.
It seems people forget the folks at home who (for whatever reason, fear of computers, lack of interest, etc.) won't want this and won't want to change. Sure, for the tech savvy, as well as the folks that have the time to do it, this is a viable option. However, there are a LOT of people out there that are perfectly content with the way things are. What is going to happen to these people? My guess, nothing, because this won't be as large (in the near future anyway) as everyone seems to think. Let the rebuttals begin...
Sent from your iPad.
All that will matter is the economy: profit at any cost.
The owls are not what they seem
The problem I have with snapstream and the other PC based PVR software is there in not guide comperable to what is available to tivo, replay, etc...All you get is a grid of times without show name or length. If you live in UK, there is digiguide integration, but I dont live in UK :)...it is rumored that there will be us version this year sometime though
Winter 2010: With Glowing Hearts
What kind of idiot would ever think that people would go out of their ways to share TV shows? Any time I hear "Napster" in regards to anything, it's a clear sign that the author didn't include a single creative thought in the article (note that this post doesn't either).
/.)
Shut up already about 'sharing' media. The more you talk about it, the more nervous media companies get. Keep it underground and you can share to your heart's content. Becoming mainstream is the precursor to it becoming illegal.
TV program 'sharing' will not revolutionize anything in any way. It doesn't do anything that can't be done much easier using existing technologies.
Snapstream is dead end technology (not unlike much of the things regarded as cool here on
if you watch tv, you get what you deserve.
love is just extroverted narcissism
My friend has every Family Guy episode burnt onto CDs. It's not hard for him to do at all now, let alone with new software. If you have the time and the interest, you can generally find anything.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
...I can't imagine a single TV show that I'd want to archive, let alone have a friend mail me.
152 channels of shit, and nothing to watch.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
If you thought the movement for copy-protected MP3s/CDs were a joke, just wait until the real money starts being invested into copy-protected TV shows, then this "napsterization" will become a self fulfilling prophecy.
my greatest fear is that if you can skip adverts, the tv companies will put advert overlays during the shows. i'm lucky to have the ads-free bbc in england.
of course, streaming media puts users back in control of the shows that are shown. as a friend of mine once said 'now is the time of diy chic'.
free (as in mp3s) electronic music
for a lot of TV and also mostly likely to be running peer-to-peer file sharing stuff.
So yes, this will probably cause the broadcast industry a lot of grief.
Unlike radio airplay, TV shows are not being sold at the same time. A lot of people tape them so they can be rewatched, traded, etc. before the episodes are sold as a "classic" compilation. And hardcore fans still buy those.
Actually you could have done it with most of the past ATI all-in-wonder cards....
caino
Don't touch my
SnapStream is far from offering the capabilities of TiVo. Just being able to tell the computer what channel to record and when isn't enough. Call me when I can tell it to record "X" no matter what time and what channel it comes on.
It seems that TiVo-like is becomming a generic term for any new recording gizmo produced.
Just like internet appliances. It'll take the household by storm! People will have one of these in each room of their house, cause they are so cheap!!
Slashdot has an article that's a vaporware salespitch.
Why do I like my TiVo? Cause of two things, I type the SHOW NAME (not the time or channel), and it records the show. And I use the "thumbs up/down" system long enough that my "TiVo suggestions" are full of shows I enjoy. Both of those aren't on this new system.
Plus, I don't want to hookup my TV to my computer. I don't want to watch TV on my computer, I want to watch it on my large screen TV while lounging on my couch!
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
I plan on rackmounting half a dozen DirecTivo's. That, and my 200 gig fibre channel array, and I'll be the most popular guy in the warez channels.
*grin*
Nah, I don't really pirate stuff, but digital archives of my favorite shows really would kick ass.
Seriously, I see in ads all the time, Windows XP lets you e-mail movies to family, my Quickcam software does likewise, but does anyone actually -DO- this?
My stepfather tried to e-mail me a (not too large) PDF the other day, and it was bounced because it was too large. @Home (what was @Home) also had a transfer limit. I expect most ISPs do. Who on earth actually e-mails 350-meg files?
--Dan
I've been doing this for years. It's easy, once you know how. I mean, IRC is festering with stuff. There are people who capture video worldwide, and then distribute through a variety of back channels. And when you combine broadband with big drives (Maxtor's 160GB is great), it's a real possibility.
There is a lot more to a Replay than a 'modified PC'. There is a stable OS that is designed to stay up without rebooting, a UI designed to access other Replays on the local network, broadband access to guide data and other Replay owners, not to mention other 'goodies' like auto commercial advance and recording conflict resolution.
Yes, there are programs that will add PVR functions to a PC, but none of them quite make it to the 'consumer box' level of integration.
My wife, an admitted technophobe, had no problem learning how to use the Replay, and loves it (my kids do also). If I had put a PC in my A/V stack, I'm sure I'd be the only one using it.
Is it me, or is this article somewhat...breathless? No mention at all of the legitimate uses of digital copying, nor any mention of how the ability to copy and freely distribute television in the past (via VHS etc, albeit at lower quality) affected the TV industry and what correlation this has with the current situation as "digitizers apply their corrosive talents" to the same. I think I'll be shocked the day I hear a TV or movie exec stand up and say "hell, why are we stonewalling this stuff? Let's just evolve our company a bit and see if we can't make a buck or two off it!" Change is expensive, I know, but in the long run refusing to change may prove far more expensive: fatally so.
--My purpose set, my will defined. Caress the air, embrace the skies.
just the media.
In order for the broadcasters to have "this technology" shot down, they are going to have to do the same to current day VCRs. Seriously, from what was described in the article, to what I do today with my VCR are no different.
Then comes the issue of "serving up" the broadcast on the web say by a P2P client. Well, I guess the same thing can be applied to a gun. Gun manufactorers are not liable of John Doe holds up a 7-11 and blows away the clerk. Makers of recording mechanisms can not be held liable if John Doe serves up the lastest Friends show on the web.
The complete Irony of this current debate is that broadcasters are screaming bloody murder that these players are NOT recording advertisments, but god forbid, are fighting tooth in nail to stop people from recording the show.
-- Knowing too much can get you killed, but knowing who knows too much can make you rich.
I can see maybe wanting to save up some shows to watch on laptop for a long flight, but who actually sits at their PC to watch TV shows? I just don't get it. I have a rec room with big HDTV for watching TV. The PC is for doing "PC" stuff.
"the napsterization"
can we all agree to stop using this dumbass word. i want to kill whoever coined it. what does it mean anyways; a useful technology that will be shutdown by big brother?
thats what i think it means but somehow i think the author means.. ooo look i can get free shit now. i hate this media inspired craze to invent new words, like there wasnt filesharing before napster.
its like saying 'the ftpization'
ITS GARBAGE
-
As far as i can tell Napster boosted sales of a lot of bands and promoted people to buy the albums, obscure bands really got a boost from napster as people often werent willing to go out on a limb to buy music they hadnt heard at any length. I know i bought 2 more albums because of my Peer to Peer experiences.
Anyway Peer to peer is hardly dead, KaZaA has almost 500,000 people using it at any one time or so says my younger bro...
The limits of my language are the limits of my world -- Wittgenstein
0xC3
Well, we could always code a piece of software to remove them....
At last an affordable replacement to the (RIP) Tivo (although I think they still sell them in the US... more extremely rich geeks there I suppose).
It's a bit before its time, though. Home users haven't really got the bandwidth to use this (ADSL penetration in the UK is at something like 1.5% of households... the rest are on 56K). The kind of people who have broadband & don't mind waiting 3 hours for an episode of star trek to download can already get all this by trawling Usenet, and the rest haven't got the patience or the hardware.
I thought the idea of putting your favourite programs on an IPAQ was amusing... 32MB wouldn't get you much video (about a minute if you're lucky, more if you don't give a crap about the quality).
In the mean time, anybody know where I can download "The Star Wars Christmas Special" or episodes 24 through 30 of Three's Company? This will surely enhance the quality of life for everyone.
I Heart Sorting Networks
Is a pirate a person who boards your ship, rapes the women, kills the men and takes all the valuables from innocent people?
Or, is a pirate a person who uses information aquired by the "Royal Company" without consent or tax paid to the elite information owners.
I understand and grant that the companies that produce the media that consumers enjoy (music, TV, movies, etc.) must make a profit in order to stay in business and continue production. What I do not understand, is why these media producers feel that the correct course of action is to attack technologies that threaten their current business models.
These companies pay their executives millions of dollars per year to create revenue streams and increase profit margins. Why can't those executives show some crativity and use the new technologies themselves?
For instance, they could seek out new viewiers for their TV shows by distributing content in unencrypted form so consumers can freely share the content with their friends. This would have worked especially well for the music industry who killed Napster instead of channeling their enormous user base into an enormous business opportunity.
For all of the money we pay execs, they ought to be able to come up with something better than "This technology threatens our current business model and must be thwarted." Business models can and must evolve with the changing climate.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
The big hold up still is with bandwidth and availability. It's possible to obtain some of the more popular series with Kazaa/WinMx/whatever, but really, there is some serious downfalls when compared to napster. The filesize still makes it difficult to get more than a few episodes a night. And given the proliferation of pr0n and misnamed files on those networks, and the incredible amount of time it takes to obtain any files, I think it'd be easier to just watch TV.
Besides, if there's anything worth keeping on television (arguable) there's always the good ol' VCR.
--
Some weasel took the cork out of my lunch.
What kind of news is this? I've been able to record movies from my TV for a few years now. ATI has been selling TV capture cards for a long time now.
This week's issue of Business Week has build-your-own-PVR instructions.
When a meme leaps from the pages of Popular Mechanics and Wired to the pages of Business Week and the Boston Globe, it's probably time for the networks and studios to pay attention and figure out how they're going to deal with this technology.
until kazaa stopped my linux client from working. I was d/ling whole series of television shows that I want to watch, but either 1) don't get the channel or 2) simply can't catch the episodes in the right order through syndication/reruns. That includes Farscape, Red Dwarf, Stargate SG-1, Dark Angel, and others. And the best part was, *every* episode was out there. Now, however, I'm a junkie in search of a fix. I broke down and started installing all the windows p2p stuff on my kids computer, but can't find a single decent replacement to kza.
Morpheus (supposedly the same thing) comes back with much fewer hits than was I was getting, and the connection seems to be worse (dropouts, "connecting" hangs, etc). winmx seems decent, but there is either no results, or the one person that has it is queued up to 11 or 12. Any given gnutella client (bearshare, etc) is plagued with the normal gnutella problems (large bandwidth usage, slow searching, limited results). Jumping on irc (dalnet) is almost useless, as the queues are jam-packed, and you have to sit there all day, just to get in a queue 20 people long. Am I missing something? I'm obviously not the only person interested in getting tv shows off the 'net (the point of the article), so there has to be a resource out there that I'm missing. What is it? And (please oh please), let there be a command-line linux client!! The ability to start screen, kick off a session of kza, go to work, check in on the progress, add some other things, go home, check up on it again, redo some searches, back and forth, was priceless. Bring back kza! Please!
/whine mode off....
I took an old PIII 700 and a $30 PVR card and made my own Tivo. There are only 2 things that are a pain. One is finding software. This is not a problem if you want to pay for it but if your building a tivo yourself your probably trying to be as cheap as possible. Second is you'll need a ir reciever for a remote. You can get them for as little $20 if you don't mind using IR-assistant or $40 if you want to use IRMan. The best thing about this over a tivo is that after the video is done recording I can transfer it across the network and archive it and play it from my regular PC so I don't need a giant array of disks sitting by my TV. Plus the recording software will do it in almost any format you want. So no spending time ripping the video afterwards. For VCD's I go Mpeg-2 for my personal stuff and Mpeg-1 for others. And if I'm gonna archive it on the PC I'll record it in Mpeg-4 to save space and keep the quality.
If your not cheating your not trying. If your not trying your not winning and if your not winning why play?
What separates this particular software from what is out there already? I realize the big picture is sending shows to others. However this has been debated before and is already possible. Why is this particular product worth mentioning?
Any day now we'll have broadcasters encoding "Dharma and Greg" with copy-control signals and mandatory copy-control conformance for all digital hardware that has anything to do with video signals. It will be effectively illegal to record any show for any purpose (including time shifting) and it will be illegal to so much as talk about ways to get around these restrictions (Or indeed, to talk about how much these restrictions suck.)
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Note that the program only lets you rip into Windows Media Format. You are then essentially stuck watching it on your PC (and windows), which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I would much rather watch things on my TV (which is much larger then my monitor).
It would be a much more interesting product if it would let you rip to a more open format, perhaps letting you burn VCDs. However then it really would be Napster-like. Though when all of those Windows Media DVD players come out, it might be a almost acceptable solution (assuming you're willing to buy a product that supports microsoft).
Let me paint you this picture:
Bob Smith is the vice president of CD sales at Unknown And Barely Surviving Record Company. When Napster hits, he's out of a job. His family has no food in their stomach. Rent is unpaid. His somewhat-luxurious lifestyle is diminished to living in the slums of some cheap neighborhood.
Okay, the above is an extreme example. But, the same thing can happen to TV now if it all goes free. Tons and tons of people spend money on advertising with TV, for example. I'm sure people will have patches/progs to avoid this advertising. And what about TV set sales? They'll plummet. Hey, who needs cable? You can just get stuff off the 'net.
Sure, some people will always want a TV for the big game, and for tradition. But think of all the jobs that this may destroy....
PayPal $$ if you sign up for free offers (eBay, cred cards, e
The main damage the television networks suffer from the 'Napsterization of TV' is the commercial time. Most of the TV shows you find on programs like Morpheus have the commercials edited out. I can only speculate on the reasoning, but my guess is that they are edited out to make the download time shorter.
How could Television networks fight this? It's simple: Provide streaming content from their website. Let's say that UPN provided a streaming version of Enterprise, for example. They could release it 24 hours after the show is initially aired. (This way, the original broadcast still has commercial/timeslot value) The requirement is that I have to fill out information about myself so they can target ads to me. Then, what they do, is when the server streams down the show, it inserts in ads targeted to my demographic at the same time that the original broadcast aird commercials.
This provides an interesting new twist to the Ad model. Not only is the demographic more far reaching, but it's no longer tied to a time-slot. If somebody discovers Enterprise 2 years into the show's run, they'll likely go back and watch the first episodes to get up to speed. This means that those commercials get aired again.
Current streaming technologies require several seconds of buffering, so it isn't worth trying to skip past them. And since I can start watching immediately, I have no need or desire to get them on a file sharing program.
With this model, not only could the networks minimize 'damage' done by these programs, but they'd also provide a potentially profitable service that works even better.
Heck, if they wanted to make even more money off it, they could charge a $2 fee to see an even higher quality stream of the video, or something like that. I wouldn't care about that for the Drew Carrey show, but I'd likely pay that to see a higher quality version of Enterprise since the sets and effects are so much more interesting to look at.
"Derp de derp."
I don't see much discussion of that, perhaps because nobody knows the answer? It hasn't been solved for music yet - no wonder the TV execs are wetting themselves.
He later decided to turn it into a business, all without getting "the express written consent..." blah, blah, blah... and got busted for it.
www.expressindia.com/fe/daily/20000701/fec01068
Now, admittedly, the legal climate has changed in the past 1.6 years, but doesn't this count as a "rebroadcast", etc. by the letter of the "old" laws even?
It looks like Ally McBeal got on Voyager...
LOAD "SIG",8,1
LOADING...
READY.
RUN
OK, so the general feeling here is that this technology is going to make actors lose a lot of money, and the TV industry go down the drain. Well, that's cool with me. It's about time they got a real job. Maybe now acting will be a hobby adn these people will have to earn a living the good ol fashioned way. Hey, I get a few chuckles out of "Friends" every now and then, but does that deserve $5 million per episode? I think not. Everyone in the "industry" seems to be so afraid, and they have good reason, if this takes shape, they'll have to actually work for their money.
~ now you know
We keep talking on /. about the stoopid record industry and how they just don't get that file locking via DRM and subscription models are Bad Ideas (TM). Maybe the video folks can actually learn from their mistakes.
What I like about these emerging solutions is how they address the underlying "business model" issues - instead of blindly trusting in DRM. Just maybe they will come to understand that you aren't going to get consumers to pay for the online content - get over it. Now what?
And to those that say Cable TV is 'Value Added': BS!
Having the shows I want to watch pre-empted by news or sports events is NOT 'Value added'
Having shows I want to watch cut short for syndication is NOT 'Value Added'.
And to those that say 'Someone has to pay for the infrastructure': BS! If TV networks want me to watch them, THEY should pay to have the infrastructure reach all the way to my house. The more they pay, the more viewers they'll have; then I wouldn't complain about the commercials.
That being said, I still think that stealing shows/music/whatever isn't good for anybody in the long run.
AC comments get piped to
Yet another stupid article about how IP hoarders are staring at the gaping maw of doom. Most people watch TV because they are too lazy to do anything else. Downloading movies and tv shows off the net using any of the napster-like file-sharing tools available is way too much hassle for the mass movement of couch-sitters. Nobody is going to go to the trouble to find and download tv shows, when they could just as easily have watched it in the first place. On a rare occasion someone might download a show they had missed, or make a collection of a series that they were really into. Wow, that's exactly like a VCR. The "piracy" in this scenario is somehow different than having a friend record a show for me and then having them bring it over to my house to watch?
I don't know, maybe it's just me, but when I watch a lot of TV, it's because I just want to sit and vegetate. There's nothing on TV that I would even consider recording, much less hunting it down on the net and downloading it, because it's all the same recycled crap that I'll end up seeing in reruns for years to come anyway. Anybody who thinks this is going to crush network television is smoking crack.
RTFA
The article is about how a technology that geeks could do is now going mainstream. Thier product is an attempt to make a mass-market PC-video solution that a non-geek can use, with consumer bells and whisles like downloading TV guide listings from the web, software bundled with TVcard hardware, scheduled recording, etc. If they did thier work right, it should have a point-and-drool interface.
And the article does have a point. When a few geeks trade thier favorite show, it's no big loss. When everyone and thier Aunt Sally does, the media industry is in the acid bath.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
That's right. Mr. Ashcroft is a good old fashioned fascist who gets his kicks from enforcing "homeland security".
In America, our politicians get nailed for banging females
You are misinformed my friend. How many American high level politicians have been caught "banging females"? Ok, one or two. Now, how many American high level politicians have been admitted to fathering bastard children and still retained their post with overwhelming support? None.
The owls are not what they seem
Well, it's a matter of a long time. For one thing, the bandwidth and playback needs of TV are far higher than those necessary for Napster to take off. Traded MP3s sound decent to most listeners, and are small enough to be shared easily over a LAN, and painfully over a 56K. Warez enthusiasts may share video today, but it's too slow and far too low quality to be a competitor to TV and movies.
For another thing, part of the ritual of television is that it's tied to time. I'll sit in front of my TV on Monday evening and watch football but would never think of downloading a Falcons-Buccaneers game from 1994 to watch on a Wednesday night.
Besides, television is free, and there's already far more of it than anyone could watch. Are fans going to hoard Futurama or Bullwinkle episodes? Sure. Will that make a dent in serious TV watching? Not in this decade.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I for one live in a market where our weekly episode of Enterprise is sydicated (no UPN affiliate) and airs during primetime on Saturday, a time when I am almost always out and about. With the absence of a Tivo at the house and a constant inability to remember to set the damn VCR I have taken to pulling the episodes from Gnutella and burning them as V(ideo)CDs to watch on my DVD player. Now I not only see them when I want, I have a VCD archive of every episode to date.
My Gnutella client (LimeWire) won't let me search for episodes of "24" because it requires searches to be at least 3 characters "to avoid congesting the network". That's tough, because they don't show reruns and if you miss an episode, good luck catching up.
But maybe that's the solution for TV producers: make all your show titles 1 or 2 characters long. Either that or just call the show "Sex" or "Porn". Nobody will ever find it.
It used to be that to watch a TV show or Movie, you had to use a TV or go to a Theater. Or buy a VHS tape or DVD. To Listen to music, you had to listen to the radio, or buy a CD. If you want to read something, you have to buy a Magazine or Book.
With TV and Radio, they could force you to consume Advertisements, and sell the Ad space. With books, DVD, and CD's, you have to buy a physical object. With a Movie theater, you have to pay admission. However, new technology has presented a third option. Use the Internet.
You do not need to buy a new physical object each time you want to get new content with the internet. So they cannot sell you a physical object. They cannot easily charge admission to a web site, and competing with free content will cause you to lose. So most subscription websites do not work very well. You can edit out or block advertisements from websites. So Popup ads are dying, and with downloaded TV via TiVo, you can remove Ads. So you cannot sell Ad space since you have no guarantee that the Ad will be viewed.
So if all your getting is the Content, how can you make a profit?
END COMMUNICATION
SnapStream 2.0 includes a tie-in to the guide at titantv.com, which includes links you can click to automatically set recording times/lengths.
It's out, I use it. The site also claims to provide dynamic links for Win-TV PVR, WinDVR, and PowerVCR II, although I've never tested them with it.
As a die hard Simpsons fan, I have nearly every episode archived so that I can watch them whenever I choose. I used to have every episode, until they came out with the whole first season on DVD. I bought it and promptly threw away my cd containing those episodes. When they release subsequent seasons on DVD, I'll buy it and get rid of my copies.
The answer to this seems pretty simple to me. Release the content on DVD. I think most people would rather shell out 15-20 bucks for a high quality copy.
Besides...how does it hurt them that I own a copy of the episodes. I still watch Simpsons episodes when they come on (both prime-time and syndicated versions).
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
There's nothing to stop you sharing SnapStream videos over the Internet. Nothing but bandwidth, that is. Most high-speed home Internet services allow rapid downloads, but relatively slow uploads. It'd take all day to send an episode of Babylon 5 at today's speeds. So there's little chance that TV shows will be Napsterized - for now.
Why is it that everytime you read one of these articles, the author always mentions that bandwidth is the primary restriction. Are they implying that the lack of bandwidth is what is stopping rampant piracy of all these shows? If that is true, then it's not so hard to believe why we don't have broadband. It's in the interest of the TV Networks, MPAA, and RIAA to keep the public from getting broadband access. In fact, it seems like there are more benefits to corporate america for restricting broadband than promoting it.
Say, why don't the TV networks, umm... build a network? ;-D
By the time you get done editing the commercials out of a 2 hour TV show -- you will finally feel like you are getting your money's worth out of that new Athlon :) In other words: It takes a steady hand and a little patience and alot of spare time to make these edits. (and then more time to Archive to CD) Some people may get off on this kind of stuff -- but after about 5 episodes of the Simpsons and another handful of Seinfield and Threes Company -- I was burned out -- and my fingers hurt...)
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
For the most part, music is available in some shape or form, even if it means buying it online. Most television programs are, as yet, not.
Case in point: my local cable company recently shut off UPN. This means that the 4 television shows i watch (Buffy, Enterprise, Angel and Special Unit 2) I no longer have the option of watching. I also can't watch it via satellite, because of FCC regulations on what can be broadcast. In other words, I have no venue to watch these television shows.
This isn't about not wanting to see the commercials. This isn't about not wanting to pay for the television shows. This is about a flat unavailability in my area. My only option is to get episodes from the internet (until/unless they eventually are put on DVD for sale, in which case I would definately buy them.)
Music, of course, since it is available on CD almost by default, doesn't suffer from this problem.
Is it breaking a copyright? Sure. Is it morally as bad as "stealing" music? Probably not. As I don't have the option of "supporting" these television shows by watching the commercials, they really aren't losing anything by this practice.
At least, not by people in my situation.
This is an interesting subject. I experienced Kontiki software, which is sort of a napster technology for official trailers, movies and content. It really works and I guess is Kontiki may become the first business success case using 'napster style' technology: peer to peer optimized network for streamming and offline movies, etc.
distributed garbage maybe
First sentance: "Like some universal solvent, digital technology seems to dissolve practically everything it touches."
...with ST:TNG. He's got every episode burned onto 50(ish) cd's. He pops 'em in whenever he's feeling a Wrath of Picard urge comin' on. Pretty sure he pulled 'em off of ICQ. Sounds like fun, but I'm still going to wait for the box sets. :)
Triv
Tired? Go to sleep and watch the rest of the game after you get some.
The neutrality of this sig is disputed.
Well all of this is nice, but it still isn't as easy as sticking a tape in the good 'ol VCR and typing in the VCR Plus number.
Newer isn't necessarily better
Me fail English? That's unpossible!
Then why hasn't this been done with "bugs" yet?
http://www.no-bugs.info/
Copy control signals (for various reasons Slashdot has discussed to death) just won't work. If I can see it and hear it, I can copy it.
What will happen instead is what we're already seeing. TV station logos planted on top of shows, opaque and animated so they can't be edited out. Video squished, bent, and overlayed to accomodate advertisements while the show is actually playing. Scenes cut out of reruns so you'll have to buy the DVD set to get the whole show.
The only way to ruin TV copying is to ruin TV. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to bother anyone doing it.
But, the studio would want to charge 5.95 or more per episode (Unless it was Lucas, Spielberg or any screen adaptation of Steven King, then it would be 5.95 per 15 minute segment, with "premium" (say Jar-Jar's death scene)segments going for 8.95), and that would be a PPV system so you could not archive it to recordable DVD or whatever media floats your boat. And the ads would not be in between "scenes" as they are when broadcast, they would be overlaid so you would be forced to watch them (maybe they would "letterbox" the show and stick the ads in the "black space" created by letterboxing.
In other words I like your idea, but the studios would retain too much "control" to make it worthwhile.
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
If so, why? I can sort of understand for cable TV, but for network television, like in the US: ABC, FOX, NBC, etc. why? It's there and it's technically "free" as in no payment (just a TV and an antenna) so what's the difference here?
Never actually thought of it that way: let the TV networks pay if they (and their ads) want to reach me... Kinda like the way radio works (get a more powerful antenna, get more people to listen...)
NO, not because of pirating music and videos, or movies... or even tv shows for that matter. We all still buy / purchase.
No, the downfall will be because of the ever surmounting lawyer bills they will receive after all the BS... After chasing one p2p network and then the next when a new one pops up... then the next... and so forth.
Learn to change / adapt, or become extinct.
www.slightlycrewed.com - Because aren't we all?
Beacuse this product actually has the ability to share built in. It automatically creates a password protected web page that someone can directly stream a recorded show from.
There's no weeding through the P2P jungle or having someone (god forbid) try to email you a show.
I so sick of hearing this crap from these greedy morons.
The entertainment industry is so consumed with greed, so blinded with an unquenchable lust for more and more money that they are unable to think straight. As soon as they hear that someone somewhere is "swapping files" their brains immediately cloud over in a greed induced panic, and they immediately launch another "search and destroy" campaign -- oblivious not only to the fair use rights of consumers but oblivious to the fact that their actions are hurting them more than helping them. It is truly ironic that the entertainment industry's greed is blinding them to simple economic realities.
On the surface, the "Napsterization" of songs, TV shows and movies seems like a bad thing. At first glance it appears that "pirates" are "stealing" from the entertainment industry. However, this is not true. In the long run, the trading of various media creates a greater demand for more and more new material.
In 1981 the RIAA was making the same claims that they make today. They claimed that they were the victims of "piracy" that was costing them huge amounts of money. In those days, CDs hadn't been invented yet and personal computers and the internet didn't exist (as we know them today). The villian, according to the RIAA, was high quality home stero equipment -- specifically cassette decks. According to the RIAA, people were swapping albums with their friends and making cassette copies of the music, thereby depriving the music industry of large sums of money.
Unfortunately (for the RIAA) they commissioned a study. The results of which they hoped to take to congress and convince them that something needed to be done about this terrible problem. However, the study was quickly shelved and the whole matter abandoned when it was revealed that people who owned sophisticated home recording equipment spent 75% more money on albums, compared to people who didn't own such equipment. A number of similar, although less thorough, studies were done when the whole Napster controvesy was at it's peak and similar results were found. People who used Napster tended to spend more money on CDs -- not less. In fact during the couple of years that Napster was in full operation, CD sales went up, not down. Another fact that the entertainment industry continues to ignore.
And if you think about it, it makes sense. If you've got a tape recorder, you need something to record. If you want to swap songs on Napster/Kaaza/Morpheus/Whatever, you need something to swap. The fact is -- the fact that the entertainment industry can't bring themself to admit -- all of this file swapping creates a demand for new material to swap. It creates an increased demand for their products -- not decreased.
There are many other issues as well. The most important one being that the trading of files is not "piracy" or "theft" as the entertainment industry is trying to claim. It is merely people doing what they have done since the being of time -- exchanging their personal propery with others. The entertainment industry is in fact engaged in an all out battle to destroy the most basic tenet of a free economy -- the private ownership of property. But that's another rant.
I would like someone to prove, once and for all, that sharing of movies, songs, etc., does the copyright holder more good than harm.
From my own personal experience, I have purchased MORE music since the sharing of mp3 started, not less, because I was exposed to MUCH MORE. I like supporting the artists and having a physical CD.
Sharing of movies hasn't really gotten to the point that audio has, but I can imagine it will affect me in exactly the same way. I'll probably buy or rent more movies as a result of sharing. I certainly don't want to watch movies on my PC. I wanna watch them on a couch, and I won't be making DVD+R copies either.
I sure would like to see a real study, that is respected by people on both sides of this issue, so we can put this subject to bed, and permanantly! I, for one, and getting really sick of hearing about it (yeah, I know, we are at the beginning of the curve on this one...).
They can rely on good-will tipping from their fans (see
Just MHO.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
It's both!
TV is pumped through my home (and my body) without my consent on a daily basis. The courts have ruled time and time again that a person's emails/ideas/etc can be "owned" by thier employer/ISP if they are using equipment or bandwidth that the employer/ISP "owns". Well, seeing as I own my own home and my body, I can impose any kind of regulation or fee onto anyone attempting to use it as a medium.
My terms and conditons are very simple: If you or your company wish to use my body as a medium to carry your radio waves, all you have to do is transfer *all* rights to the copyrighted works being transmitted on those waves to me. Radiating those waves into me will considered consent to this contract.
So there you have it, if you are watching non-cable TV in the San Francisco area: I, THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER OF ALL SAN FRANCISCO TV, HEREBY GRANT PERMISSION TO REDISTRIBUTE THOSE WORKS FREELY.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
Agreed. How long before we see a collectively maintained database of show times, similar to what FreeDB is for CD titles?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Compaq Presario 6000
> TV program 'sharing' will not revolutionize anything in any way. It doesn't do anything that can't be done much easier using existing technologies.
Actually, it does. Digital recording allows for several things that "today's technology" (read: what's popular today) can't easily do:
1.) Digital data is much more portable than video tape. Where VHS can't go (handhelds, over the wire, in small storage spaces), digitized video can.
2.) Editing out commercials is a pain in the ass with video tape, and requires more than one machine. With digital video, chopping out the commercials doesn't require much in money, time or expertise.
3.) Sharing is much easier, for reason 1 above. I can readily share VHS tapes only with people I meet in meatspace unless I want to incur mailing costs, whereas I can send digital video anywhere in the world with ease.
I can see easily why TV executives are scared by this loss of content control. Imagine how concerned they must be at the prospect that I can capture VHS-quality recordings of a whole season of Buffy, strip the commercials out and store them on one DVD (which will be cheap enough for widespread use within two years, if the CD-RW market is any indicator).
Virg
Episode 24: Jack gets involved in a sexual misunderstanding with the girls. Mr. Roeper thinks Jack is gay. Mrs. Roeper makes fun of Mr. Roper's sexual performance.
Episode 25: Jack gets involved in a sexual misunderstanding with the girls. Mr. Roeper thinks Jack is gay. Mrs. Roeper makes fun of Mr. Roper's sexual performance.
Episode 26: Jack gets involved in a sexual misunderstanding with the girls. Mr. Roeper thinks Jack is gay. Mrs. Roeper makes fun of Mr. Roper's sexual performance.
Episode 27: Jack gets involved in a sexual misunderstanding with the girls. Mr. Roeper thinks Jack is gay. Mrs. Roeper makes fun of Mr. Roper's sexual performance.
Episode 28: Jack gets involved in a sexual misunderstanding with the girls. Mr. Roeper thinks Jack is gay. Mrs. Roeper makes fun of Mr. Roper's sexual performance.
Episode 29: Jack gets involved in a sexual misunderstanding with the girls. Mr. Roeper thinks Jack is gay. Mrs. Roeper makes fun of Mr. Roper's sexual performance.
Episode 30: Jack gets involved in a sexual misunderstanding with the girls. Mr. Roeper thinks Jack is gay. Mrs. Roeper makes fun of Mr. Roper's sexual performance.
If you want, I'll let you know the plot of Gilligan's Island too!
True story: Actual synopsis of Dr. Who last month on DBS... "The Doctor must defeat various foes."
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dman123 forever!
Filtering out the -1s and 0s since 1999.
Since last month, I've gotten all of Trigun, all of The Tick (the original cartoon show), and all of Evangelion from Direct Connect, with help from Morpheus.
The only reason I haven't gotten much, MUCH more is that I don't like most TV shows.
I'm amazed that slashdot would report about such old news as television sharing; I expect a headline like that from the traditional news.
mlylecarlin
Modern society has moved beyond the "pay talentless celebrities enormous amounts of money" phase. I'm sure that a large percentage of Slashdotters are amateur artists. Im sure that some of them are pretty good. But we all have day jobs.
The peer to peer revolution just means that Lars from Metallica will have to learn a marketable skill and get a real fucking job! He can still make music (or they can still make movies/TV shows/whatever), but now they have to make a contribution to society like the rest of us!
-dbc
Must Carry rules went into effect in the beginning of January. I was under the impression that satellite and cable operators had to offer all local channels if they offered any at all. Like the other posters said, if you are eligible for locals on satellite, you can get WB and UPN.
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dman123 forever!
Filtering out the -1s and 0s since 1999.
There is indeed an active TV show trading scene, recently segments of this market are starting to really look official. For example, there is the Digital Archive Project (no link provided because I don't want you lusers crashing their site) which has managed to encode 90% of the MST3K episodes and is working on the other 10%. That's almost 150 CDs worth of DivX data! Their distribution system is quite impressive, and at least in the USA, it seems their activities are legal.
IANAL, but I'd like to hear from someone who is/can ask one whether the Betamax decision protects our rights to share recorded broadcasts with our friends. (The precedent is, a videotape of a show is legal if it's made for personal use, and playback can be time-shifted and occur somewhere other than the place where it was recorded. Well, actually, I don't know how broadly this applies...)
There are many people who have every Simpsons episode on their hard drive, and even more who have every South Park (they've only had five seasons). There already is a video napster: it's called Electic Donkey--and there's also a lot of stuff going around on DC. This Boston Globe reporting is hardly front-line journalism. But I guess the vitality of the TV show trading community may be because the mainstream media have largely ignored them--so here's to hoping we go back to that.
true artist will always create. Probably make money be charging for the intial viewing.
Perhaps this would re-ignite theater?
Artist will ge paid(maybe not millions) one way or another, the corps will have a porblem maintinaing current revnue growth, and probably collpase to make way for a business model that fits the new entertainment distribution model.
Or they'll be a 5 dollar a month sur-charge to download bore then 20 megs a month.
or 5 addition dollar for every 100 megs of downloading over the first 100 megs.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The television industry shouldn't be as threatened by this as the music or movie industries. Movies will always be better for many people when seen in a large theater, but that won't save the video market. There'll always be a market for concert tickets and radio ads, but that won't save album sales. For both music and movies, having consumers purchase (or rent) a digital copy of the material is a large part of their market; if people can get them for free, a substantial portion of their possible revenue stream is gone. This is much less so for television, where the practice of offering collections of episodes on tape or DVD has never been widespread.
Another thing is the "water cooler" aspect of (particularly prime-time) television. How many people are archiving Survivor episodes? What's a tape of the Super Bowl worth? For many television shows, the biggest lure is watching them with everyone else, being able to talk about them afterward, and having that shared experience with many people.
Finally, there's the sheer volume and variety of the material. Of course, a great deal of it is utter crap, but that hasn't hurt it so far. It's worth noting that priced-to-own VHS has not hurt the cable movie channels. This is because it's very difficult to assemble a video library so comprehensive that you wouldn't want to watch anything else. The cable movie channels are forced to specialize mostly in a) popular movies people may not have bought yet, b) older movies people didn't bother buying, and c) softcore porn flicks some people were a little embarrassed about buying. They seem to be doing quite well for themselves for all that, though. There are certainly enough of them these days... I believe a similar dynamic will keep radio ads afloat for a long time. I simply don't have enough CDs to listen to nothing else for very long without getting sick of the whole lot; thus, I listen to the radio quite a bit when I'm in the car. The extension to TV and TV ads is obvious; no matter how easy it is, it's unlikely anyone (or at least not enough people) will be able to keep a copy locally of anything they might ever want to see on television.
Television will continue to be driven by the ad market, and the TV ad market won't completely collapse until somebody figures out a more efficient method of getting public exposure, of buying eyeball time and introducing themselves into people's lives. As long as advertisers continue to view the internet with fear and suspicion, television (such as it is) is probably safe even in the face of rampant piracy.
RIAA, MPAA, "TV Moguls", why do you shoot yourselves?
They continue to broadcast their media on freely available recordable channels and complain when we record those broadcasts. If they were serious about protecting the "rights" and not the profits, they would discontinue all broacast of all media and make any recording devices illegal. This load of "Don't steal our stuff, but feel free to enjoy and record it for your use" pisses me off. I urge everyone to record the next network broacast film, the next Boy Band hit song, and the next episode of The Simpsons, and show them that they are the ones that placed the original sharing network in place. We have only embraced and extended it.
Peace, Love, Games
In the end the masses always win, it's true for the gov it will be for AOL/TimerWarner etc...
:) And I'll be riding the wave you can bet on it !
I mean the ONLY way they can stop the video distrubution of the shows without the ads by a third party.
Is by offering the service the masses Want !
So you want MPEG2 quality Movies and Shows to d/l on the internet with no ads ?
Here it is , we'll charge you X for subscription to South Park, Simpsons, etc... something wich i'm sure will be a small fee.
Better yet ! why don't they distrubute the shows with their ads on the net ??
I mean , if I could get a show I want at 300k/sec I won't bother trying to d/l it from kazaa or irc for 4 hours.
I'm betting very soon you'll see TV/Inet/Telphone very closely linked and commercial broadband media distrubution.
It's the next 5 years.
And btw ? don't you change channels why there's an ad ? Are they going to make this illegal ? I mean we have the Right Not to Watch their ads , it's their problem ! They need to find a better business model (same thing happened with the banner ads on the net)
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Can't w8 to get my 1Gbit link
Do what you wilt shall be the whole of the law Love is the law, love under will Capital drives the will of mankind
The concept of a digital video recorder that records anything, anytime, is a great idea.
SnapStream is a bad implementation. The streaming aspects of SnapStream are good but it is weak on the codec and programming guide end. It has a programmign guide, but it is far from complete, but the nail it its coffin is that it does not allow the use of third party codecs and its CGI-based interface is slow to say the least.
There is where ShowShifter comes in (www.showshifter.com). ShowShifter allows for the use of third party compression codecs. With my 950mhz AMD Processor, I can compress to DivX in realtime with about 30% processor utilization. Whith my processor I can't compress the audio in realtime with DivX, but if I'd like to archive the show I simply compress the audio later inside ShowShifter. But for those with slower processors ShowShifter can capture in a light compression codec and then recompress when it has time.
A one hour CD at excellant quality (which is indistiguishable on a television, and barly noticable on a PC) can fit on a CD. I know more people than me are doing such things as when I miss an episode of a show I like to watch, it can often be found on eDonkey (www.eDonkey2000.com). Alot of sci-fi shows are up as the people who are recording these things are the same type who enjoy sci-fi, but as the technology spreads I'm sure it will become more diverse.
The Napsterization of television has already begun.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
I see one glaring mistake in this whole argument: TV isn't worth it. TV shows are so mediocre to horrible, that it's just not worth anyone's time to copy, distribute, archive it etc. unless it's a little 30 second segment (fair use) or you're a TV network. I wouldn't want to waste my time downloading TV shows. I have 2 video-in cards in my computer, but I only use them for video games -- I have no TV antenna, it's just not worth it.
Quick question: do any of the currently available capture systems and codecs do closed-captioning? My wife is hearing-impaired, so I would love to be able to have captioned digital video, but everything I've found so far has been caption-free.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
"Very bad idea! What if the advert contains a time limited offer? A product that is no longer available? A product that has since been proven to cause cancer in chipmunks?"
"Then, what they do, is when the server streams down the show, it inserts in ads targeted to my demographic at the same time that the original broadcast aird commercials" -- what I said was that it inserts the ads, meaning it happens when you go view it from their site.
I'm not talking about downloading the video file, I'm talking about STREAMING it. They can insert whatever ads they want, whenever they want.
"Derp de derp."
For an American politician fathering a bastard child would be a political suicide.
Over here it's just a fact of life. Men were never supposed to be monogamous.
live in filth and corruption
Whatever. At least we've got quality health care, schooling and public transport for everyone.
The owls are not what they seem
It's a clever idea, but the affiliates also make money off the shows.
Example: A certain number of spots are reserved for the local affiliates, who sell them to whoever, often its local businesses like the car dealership. There are some businesses that actually go around buying local time in large regions for regional products or for companies that want to be more discriminating about their media buys.
Anyway, the point is that UPN couldn't stream the content to end users without pissing off affiliates -- this is part of the reason that its taken so long to get networks on satellite dishes and why you can't get, say, LA affiliates if you live in Minnesota.
They may be able to do something that compensates the local affiliate for the spot views they lose, but it'd be complex math as the value of the spot time is directly related to the Nielsen/Arbitron numbers they get for that show. Ideally they would just show you the local spots, but that would be really complicated (insuring that all stations sent digital versions of their local spots for merging into the stream, etc). Another way may be to do a national spot and divide the revenue by the number of local station regions that had streamed viewers.
PvR software has been around for AGES for the PC - just do a quick search on Freshmeat. Theres is NOTHING new about this product. It has a server? PAH!! ( What the hell are Linux, Apache, IIS etc? )Can play movies on the pocketpc? PAH ( pockettv is about 2 years old and pocketdivx rocks ). You can send recordings over the internet? PAH!! I've been downloading and burning episodes of trek for the last 3 years or so.
I am REALLY suprised to see something like this on slashdot.....
Bandwidth costs: That episode of Enterprise is gonna take anywhere from 250-500MB and your $2, demographic information and eyeballs for 8 minutes of commercials ain't gonna cover it.
Next while it's not easy to fast-forward or skip commercials right now it will be about two hours after such a service as you're proposing is released.
Then there's the point that in that first hundred of folks to download this will be a few who will chop out the irrelevant bits and throw them on their p2p servers and the whole model will collapse 'cause there are a lot of folks willing to share (even though it doesn't work big-scale economically) and others more then happy to get without paying.
Now, some sort of on-demand streaming is likely to happen, but it's gonna involve lots of heavy encryption and may not use your PC at all but a game console, hopped up DVD-player or most likely a next-gen TiVo-type player. The streaming will likely come from your cable head-end and you'll pay just lik you do existing Pay-Per-View.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
"Of course, if someone can download shows to his hard drive, edit out the commercials, and post them to the net, then this business model breaks down - just like all other business models do, in the face of free digital copying. How do you make money selling content (or giving it away with commercials in it), when anyone can get it for free (or with the commercials edited out)?"
I said streaming, not downloading. If the site stays up for long enough, then most people won't worry about finding a no commercials version. (If they do, it means the ads are too intrusive, and that's something the broadcast company can control.)
If I can just go to a site, click on a link, and it immediately starts coming down to watch, then it's already much better than using a file sharing program where you have to download the entire file from sometimes flakey connections.
If the networks do this right, there won't be a need for downloading it to keep. A few people might do it just for the heck of it, but I betcha most people wouldn't. Personally, I'd rather watch the ads version if I can get it to start right away, then wait for a file to come down. In the days of instant gratification, I think the majority of the people would understand that view.
"Derp de derp."
How does this help me share the content with my friends? By having them get at the shitty stream in wmv format? Give me a break!
/. coders:
Here is something I want for all of you code-genius
A simple windows programs (ok maybe mac and linux too) that allows me to __mirror__ a directory to a friend so that all of my hard work at Morpheus can be shared on a private buddylist basis.
Two things:
1. I know I know: cron+rsync+ssh+bash script. But this thing has to run on windoze and has to be much easier than this.
2. I know, I know: its not as free as just continuing to get/put the content on the Fast Track network. But I have a lot of buddies who would like to see my episodes of 24, but who wouldnt go near Morpheus for fear of all of that crappy spyware and because when they tried to download the LoR preview at work they ended up getting a video of Pamela Anderson giving head to some bonehead rocker.
Help me out programming geniuses!
Virtual Dub, direct stream copy. As there'll usually be a keyframe at commercial in and out, it shouldn't be any problem, no reencoding needed.. even if it doesn't get everything there's max 15 secs of commerical crap instead of five minutes. If you want the last frames out, reencode till the first keyframe after the commercial break, and cut and paste it together. I doubt I'd use more than 10 mins on an hour show total...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I think they should charge MORE to companies running ads in unencrypted freely availiable shows - Hell integrate the ads into the shows so you can't skip them. Set them free online - every so often you'd get a 'killer' show that everyone is mailing links to, more product exposure, everybody wins.
Starsucks
That's what to push for in legislation.
How do media artists make a living when their product can be copied an infinite number of times for virtually zero cost?
You know, I've been thinking about this for a bit. Something along the lines of
1. Just suppose for whatever reason, Copyright can not be enforced and
2. Suppose that not only can Copyright not be enforced but the means of distribution can not be controlled.
Oh I imagine something like, someone somewhere will always be able to break whatever Code, the Media decideds to use, and that soon enough everyone will use encryption so that no one will know what is flying over the Net.
3. What happnes to the Artist? Oh sure, everyone talks about how the artist will get money from people that care, or from live preformaces, but I think this really Ignores the fundamental idea of IP (intellectual Property
4. I wonder if its really the Creative Process we are being ask to pay for? I think this might be an interesting argument because it would certainly go a long to nullifying a lot of arguments that go something like
"Well, if it doesnt cost them anything to re-produce or make more copies, then dont have any right to profit on something that costs them almost nothing"
I think what an Artist could argue is that "I am going to show you something, that you could not have come up with on your own, be it words or music or pictures or what have you, and I am charging you to experience. I am not charging you for this digital copy or that digital copy, but You are giving me money so that I can allow you see what I have made
Now I know some may argue that WE have a right to see al information, but I am not exactly sure this is true. And this can bring up a whole slew of other discussions,
but for now, I really do think that these issues are going to come to head as we come more and more to understand exactly what we are dealing with when it comes to digital data. I think it will be a very interesting debate
Thanks!
Sigs are dangerous coy things
I think the Street Performer Protocol is a possible solution, and it also happens to have other benefits.
Read my keyboard review.
It's not speed and it's not 100% convenience. Set top boxes are the sweet spot between total control of intellectual property by consumers and total control by producers. They give you just the power than you paid for while not allowing you to do what you didn't pay for. In fact the convenience is so important that most of you will opt for set top boxes no matter how uncopyable the media is. Add some effective marketing and you've just found the solution to the piracy crisis.
Do your ovens run Jew/Linux?
Sure, if you want a third-world standard of entertainment. Mark Twain never had to get tips from fans.
And would you believe it, all the software required is FREE when you use Windows!
I have a WinTV Hauppauge PCI card (one of the older versions) and can use it to broadcast television live off my PC, over the internet where I can watch it on my laptop in laboratories at university =)
There is this wonderful FREE WINDOWS tool called Windows Media Encoder. Download it off Microsoft's site (for free). Use WinTV to select the channel you want to broadcast. Then run up Windows Media Encoder. This tool will perform REALTIME compression of the audio/video and broadcast it over the internet (out of my ADSL line) using Windows Media
On my laptop, I simply type in my hostname in Windows Media player (or use dyndns for my hostname) and from labs at internet, I get to watch telly =)
Fun stuff
Sure, true artists will always create, the question is will they share?
TV has one thing that will keep people watching it: it only happens first once. So if you are a major X-Files fan, you are going to want to be watching when the new episode happens, even if you could download it for free later. TV also has inherently less replay value than music, so you probably won't want to have old TV shows around the way you want your HD filled with MP3s.
-Chris
I find it strange that you advocate your disgusting nazi agenda along with the green party.
Do you know the German formula for "green" fertilizer? It uses no dangerous or polluting chemicals. You start by burning a bunch of Jews to ash...
yahoo.com already has a nice TV schedule; maybe they would make it available to special projects in exchange for ad space;
on another note, I'm still hoping that a general news site will provide info in RDF so I can download news to my LED sign;
I run on DSL. Downloading a movie is unreliable, boring and the final image is usually pretty bad. I'd rather walk through snow and ice to rent some crap from Blockbuster. And I almost never even bother doing that.
T.V. sucks. Most movies suck. There are a million more interesting ways to be entertained. I hate television! -Bad writing, bad production values, bad acting, and all packaged in a sludge of mind-warping advertising and propaganda. Why subject myself to such a horrid assult? Why would anybody?
But nearly everybody does. And right now, it's a million times easier to flop down and waste away in front of whatever crap is being broadcast than it is to go hunting on-line for 50Meg low-res, shit color episodes of whatever (with the last two minutes missing because of some download failure).
Until cheep and ubiquitous download speeds arrive which allow for very easy, very quick access to high quality television content. . . Well, it just won't make much difference to the status quo.
And I am willing to bet ANYTHING that even if such a time does come, that it won't make a lick of difference. I don't care what distribution/financial model is adopted, there will ALWAYS be TONS of new and 'interesting' programming being shoveled up for the populace to waste away in front of.
Pardon me, but if anybody thinks that the Powers That Be are going to allow all the meat puppets to unplug themselves from their nightly borg-alcove brain-fry sessions. . .
Well anybody who thinks that has been watching too much TV.
Now, if you'll excuse me, the Scary Monkey Show is about to start. . .
-Fantastic Lad
I *do* want a third-world standard of entertainment. I'd like to see a society where as many people are entertain-ers as entertain-ees. The current situation where a small number of people are paid a lot of money by corporations to entertain the masses means that the masses are by and large exposed only to the types of entertainment that the corporations choose to expose them to. Compare this to a potential future where you have your choice of millions of disparate amateur sources of entertainment, and I think you'll agree that even the "500 channels" dream of digital cable looks pretty poor in comparison.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
As if we didn't have enough problems with copyright owners wanted ever computer user tagged and monitored all day long, we now have to run articles about how TV is going to get Napsterized? Is it just me or does this seem more detrimental to the computer community than helpful?
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Football is gay. You are stupid. Anyone who would spend that much time - worrying about the performance of a sports team....fuckin waste of space IMHO.
Gosh, if only all the questions I get would be so easy. If the problem here is only that the media artists don't get paid because the means of copying (blank CDs, DVDs, and network bandwidth) have zero cost, then the obvious answer is to raise the cost of copying and use the funds raised to pay people. We already have a (broken) system for doing that on the CD-R(W) front. There is no reason why realistic copying fees couldn't be added to blank media, or to the cost of network bandwidth. (For that matter, we could and should charge for networkk bandwidth down to the personal level so that free-riding on bandwidth becomes less of an issue.)
That part is easy. The fair distribution of revenue is a bit trickier. Basically, artists should be paid proportionally to the volume of traffic/copying of their works on the net. The way to do this is to add in some kind of wartermarking or other unique signature to the content being shipped around, and then regularly check random samples of traffic to see what people really are watching or ripping. (If this sounds silly, I'll point out that this is how virtually any media rating service works, and how over-the-air residuals and royalties are computed.) So, in February 2002, it might turn out that U2 had 0.01% of all media traffic on the web, while Gene Autry had 0.000005%. Total media and bandwidth charges might have been US$2 billion. So U2 gets $2 million, while the Gene Autry foundation gets...$100. That would be a fair if not deserving outcome. :-)
The beauty of the system here is that people get paid, but people also get freedom of access. It also allows rights holders to take the moral and artistic high ground against (what would have to be illegal and heavily punished) subversion of the system. If you strip out the identifying information, you really are depriving an artist of income. If you butcher a soundtrack or a video by down-sampling or screwing around with the original, you have made a derivative and inferior work, and the artist has every right to legal action on those grounds.
One mild disadvantage of the system I suggest is that it would be hard initially for sellers to set differential prices for different performances/performers. (Differential pricing has not had as high an impact as it should have so far in many of these industries, but that's a different story.) I think the way to make that work is for publishers to make potentially available high/medium/low quality versions of the work to be distributed, but then make sure that the stuff they want to charge more for is (say) not available in a low quality (and low-bit-rate) stream. Some artists might be deeply sensitive to the quality issue and insist that their stuff only be available at higher bit rates, while the starving and waiting to be discovered might be thrilled to make their work available more cheaply. I think this could really work.
The problem, as always, is that there are definitely vested interests who would not want it to work, or are concerned about the obviously immense changes in their business models. That is how movie studios reacted to the home VCR, of course. The thing to like about it is that it decriminalizes copying, yet generates a revenue stream.
Babar
Artists normally create a stream of content. Some of it brilliant, some of it good, and some it trash.
Recording companies can't currently sell streams of entertainment, they are manufacturing companies after all. They make their money by predicting and/or forcing the economy to buy in bulk stuff they have produced six months beforehand. If they either under or over produce, they are royally screwed.
Along comes duh internet. Artists can now publish infinite streams of content because the internet has no limit to the amount of content that can get published (think lossy compression;). It is in effect near zero lead time mass manufacturing for near zero cost.
So what can the artist and record company make a buck out of? As I have said before, the money comes from finding and shaping talent, and matching that talent with groups of consumers.
I'd willingly pay hard cash for a stream of mp3's that have my eclectic music tastes. Usually I have to buy two dud cd's for every good one I buy.
And if, as we are seeing, the value of most of this pap is $0, well, go figure.
The amazing thing is that anyone would want to watch a sitcom -again-. The only weekly shows I ever made a fetish of taping were "Twin Peaks" and "Max Headroom". They were worth it (well, only the first four or five Headroom shows was). Not much else is.
I believe the later All-in-wonder cards have hardware MPEG2 encoder chips, which make it a lot more practical to record in real time at decent quality
Futurama has been released on DVD in the UK, as has the first 5 seasons of Buffy, all of Friends, all of B5, all of Trek, lots of Simpsons, etc., etc.
My Journal
That may be good enough for shows that have a stable time slot, but would be useless for anything less regular (movies, sports, etc.). There are a few programs out there though (XMLTV for example) that can parse some tv listings sites, although I don't know how kindly they'd take to having listings downloaded without the ads on a mass scale. You probably won't see anything with unrestricted access and usage als long though, that's where the tvguides of the world make the bucks (of the US anyway, I think there may be services in Europe where it is less restrictive)
If they want to. That's their prerogative.
__
Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
It "might" be competitor to ReplayTV but it certainly isnt competitor to Moxi.. they dont have a market yet, and even when they do, they only support digital channels... so no nbc, abc, fox, ups, wb or cbs ;-)
:P
Besides, snapstream is nothing revolutionary... just goes one step futher than video capture cards... hardly an TiVO or replay TV competitor... thats like saying that dvd-roms in computers are competitors to standalone dvd players... right
With exception to the emailing bit, it's already happened with those of us with broadband connections. In many ways it's been a very good thing to fans of a few series.
Point in case: I'm a big big Stargate-SG1 fan. I've been watching the series for about 2 years now, and every place I've lived I payed for cable with a Showtime package *just* so I could watch that one show (I could care less about the rest of Showtimes original content).
Well, this season (5) has been a real bumber. Showtime has not been airing the new episodes for the past 6 months or so (I think they are blaming it on the Sep 11th attacks -- I shit you not). But the show has been airing on Skyone over in europe. So my solution? I've been downloading the new episodes off IRC 2-4 months in advance! And I decided to not get showtime/cable when I moved this time. Why pay for showtime if they are not going to show the one damn series I care about and I can get download it for free?
All I know is cable/boradcast companies have got to stop pulling this shit and add a little bit more bang for the buck If they don't want to loose a bunch of their consumers to free downloads n' such. I know alot folks over in Europe have this same problem. I remember kids over in the UK that were a full 3 seasons behind when Star Trek DS9 was airing. If that was the case here, I would be downloading the episodes instead of waiting 2 years. And I don't even think I have to say anything about how sci-fi shows get bumped out of thier already wack timeslots due to sports events and such (see superbowl).
*SIGH*. It may be amoral, or some eye for an eye mentality, but damnit -- it corporations feel the need to screw the consumer at every chance they get, I'm going to steal everything thats not nailed down to the floor. That's why I have over 300 gigs of TV shows. Commercials are for suckers.
"The Wright brothers were the first to fly with a heavier-than-air machine, but boy did they have a lousy plane"
Having spent a good deal of my summer working on my own PVR, I've tried almost every package that's available for the PC. There are a number of packages that have their benefits, but nothing beats ShowShifter ( http://www.showshifter.com ). Features on this thing include:
- Record, pause, rewind live TV
- Set up scheduled recordings
- Recompress video to CD size in the background
- Play DVDs with digital audio out
- CD playing
- MP3 playback
- TV oriented interface for living room based sets.
No package is perfect, and ShowShifter is definitely not a video editing suite. Use VirtualDub or some other package to copy your video tapes to CD.
Like I said - I've tried way too many packages and this is the only one that's compared to TiVO.
But then what would you put behind the ads, apart from blank space?
I watch it regularly, sort of the mental health version of asking your friend to punch you in the stomach to see if you can take it.
All the text in your post is green.
HDTV Tivos are already out there, PC based. 9.5G/30 mins. of HDTV. Two Universities just did an HDTV stream, 1.6Gb, that's about two thirds of an OC48. Last time I did the math, a full screen NTSC digitized down to ~6Mbps. So, how many of us have a 6Mbps connection to support that famous 'on demand' real time stream?
Amazing how few people do the math!
Just my 2. The delete key is your friend.
See the media industry needs to roll with this instead of against it. They could market product spots much better. You'd have the primary market of first run shows and people watching them when they are on, the secondary market of PVR/VCR timeshifters, the tertiary markets of people who missed the programs altogther and need to trade over a connection. Advertise some shows in the client that downloads the files and boom you've increased your market share on a product that may have stopped running on the regular network some time ago. Just think all those "BJ and the Bear" shows might get seen again or maybe "Shazaam" will get a rousing come back. All without the media companies having to do anything but do some (more fake) studies about how the commercials ARE (not) getting customers to spend on those high ticket items. I say go with the flow.
"Do not be swept up in the momentum of mediocrity." - anon
I have purchased Snapstream and I would really urge anyone that is even thinking about it to read snapstream's own discusion forum first. This is one software purchase I really regret, the trial version kinda works but it is of course fairly limited, its only when you really start using the software seriously that the flaws show up. Crashes are fairly common, tunning is a major issue if you are outside the US and the *only* recording format that is supported is Windows media. The quality of the recordings isn't exactly great either (when the software actually does record that it).
What does surprise me is nobody has really stated that they are running Linux to do PVCR functions. What software is around on the Linux front?
A journey of a thousand miles starts with a brutal anal raping at airport security
I have no joke, I just like to say
"digital acid bath."
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
In a way the TV-companies are responsible for this themselves.
.WMF.ASF , with keyframes every 5 minutes or so, instead of nice divX with a keyframe every second.
I live in Holland, and I like to watch sci-fi shows (Red Dwarf, Farscape, Trek, etc..). However, most of these shows don't run here at all, with the exception of Trek and Red Dwarf on the BBC.
I read all about Enterprise on the net, and was quite curious what it would be like. The only way to watch Enterprise (or The final season of Voyager, or Farscape, or Scifi-channels Dune, etc...) is to download the rips from KaZaa/E-Donkey/IRC/Whatever. If I had to wait for dutch TV or the beeb to show this, I'd still be waiting at least 6 months, now I get to see the shows within a few days of the first airing in the USA.
These days, the only way I use my TV-set is to view downloaded episodes using the tv-out on my PC, this way I get the sound over my stereo too, which is a nice improvement. The only thing that sucks is that some people think it's good to pir episodes in crappy
The good side is I never have to hear that fsck-uped intro to Enterprise anymore... The person who made that intro needs to be killed in a slow and horribly painfull way.
Oh, and about the comercials, neither dutch (Public) TV nor BBC show commercials during shows anyway.
Jealous?
OK couple questions then.
If this is easy were are to directions to do so?
second are there any considerations that need to be taken if you want to archive properly?
From VHS>>>digital media for example.
Mark Twain made most of his money on the lecture circuit.
-----
Kvetch is Yiddish for "throw an exception" --Dr. Ron Cytron
On second thought, I'm just going to cry myself to sleep. Yes, I'll shut up dear.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
If your capture device is Video for Windows compatible, then VirtualDub can capture video with it.
Yeah, that's gonna work real good with M$'s new Digital Violations Operating System. While it's cool of them to make the effort, I doubt the rest of us will be able to make use of windows API calls when the time comes, but will just use everyone else's properly functioning X or SVGA routines. It's sad to see effort wasted making a product like Windows more palitable. Why do people put their effort into this stuff? It will only be used to oppres you later.
Am I bitter? Hell yes I am. Your computer is being made into a freaking TV that serves mostly to suck comercial crap. The internet is being used as the new pipe to shove yet more crap on us as opposed to the airwaves that have been dominated by three or four giant publishers for the last fourty years: They at least came at no cost but advert mark up at the store. Does'nt anyone else see the convergence of all this as the absolute destruction of original content from around the world? Do you imagine that this will be used to distribute anything but big media junk? The very tools of creation will be removed before long. Those who wish to create will be forced to spend loads of money for Apples that purposfully have file types that do not transfer to these new boxes. How well do you think apt-get is going to work with all of this crap flying around? Free Softwar in general will be choked by the telcos as they close in their grab on the net. You don't imagine it will be long before the new infrastructure has packet prioritization bassed on origin, not yours? Isn't forced DHCP a warning that none but the mighty shall publish? Voice over IP has been possible for years, but you still pay by the minute to talk to your friends, in fact the US is now paying more than ever for telco "services". I have seen the future and it is the past.
To all you warez dudes out there, You are a problem. While you think you are sticking it to the man with your cracked software, MP3s and comercialless Simpson episodes, you are really helping them. You are just dumping more comercial junk on the world and preventing people from looking elsewhere, even within, for solutions to their software and entertainment desires. Go out and make something. Fight like hell. Think, create, propagate your ideas.
I don't even watch TV, it clouds the mind. There are so many other sources of information and inspiration. Read, do things, live damn it, then write, sing and make films about it. You don't think real stories come from big media giant? No, they get ripped off, diluted and sold back to you. As you consume the dilution, so go your own thoughts and dreams.
Thank you, and good night. I am insane.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Can somebody explain to me how this got modded down due to flaimbait? What did I say that was so inflammatory? *totally dumbfounded*
"Derp de derp."
I've watched TV on PC before, and in general it's not so good. The high resolution of a modern monitor really makes the quality look really bad. However, there is one time I watch TV on a PC, that is when I tote around a laptop. This is really nice for long trips in a Van, I can even bring along a video game console and run both the laptop and the console off a DC/AC converter. What's nice about this is that laptops come with bigger screens and still use less power than a portable TV set.
I also use the TV tuner functionality sometimes when I go to Pracs. Any laptop is lighter and easier to tote around than even the lightest of portable TVs and provides the largest screen possible for the weight and power consumption. It's a great justification for getting a Laptop. I'm using a USB based TV Tuner so the quality isn't as good as a PCI, firewire, or PC Card based one. It's still very useful though.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
My gf just bought a DVD player. The first DVD she bought was Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 1. (She's a big fan) I've only now begun to watch this series and am seriously hooked. So we spent a whole weekend watching Buffy Season 1, me asking a million questions trying to catch up, and when we watched all 12 episodes, we wanted MORE. But Buffy Season 2 on DVD doesnt come out until June. Bummer.
But wait. Somewhere, locked and hidden away, some broadcaster has tapes of every Buffy episode to date, or TNG or Voyager. And I have a fast ass net connection. In fact, our cable provider gives us net access AND digital cable. So what's the fucken problem people?!? Why the hell can I not browse through every single recorded song ever (like in the Qwest commercial - ride the light?), or go to buffyslayer.com and get divx's of season 2. It could be a streaming video, a download , or a $0.50 charge to my cable account per episode. Delivered via the net, or via the TV signal. Either way, the *demand* exists.
I'm sure my gf will still get the DVD, so they'd be making money off our buffy-crack addiction today, and tommorrow on the DVD too.
The internet has changed the economies of media. Sight, sound, and speech are no longer subject to the laws of scarcity. The only scarcity is that which has not been created. So one of the most lucrative distibution markets in North America is also the one rendered obsolete. I need food and clothing and housing and transportation; those items cannot be delivered over the net.
But my newspaper, music, TV, movies, and p0rn can all be delivered near instantaneously to me over a fast net connection. Except their not. Because the media companies are holding their IP hostage and creating a scarcity of goods where it does not exist.
Either the consumer will be subject to random search and seizure, using only sanctioned software on sanctioned hardware (linux on PS2, or Xbox), or the consumer will get most of their content for such a low cost that freeloading will be pointless and unnecessary. The cost needs to be so low that hunting on IRC or your favourite P2P will be a waste of time. Because once your media is out there, it can and will find its way on the net, and will float around for a really long time. Otherwise the need to control the content will create a society of US vs. THEM, PIRATES vs. CORPORATIONS.
Billboards:
"Hillary says: The Movement needs YOUR help! Just say NO to Piracy!"
Grade 1:
"OK class, today we are going to learn about ethics on the Internet."
Nightly "news":
"TONIGHT! On KING12! The Mayor comments on the week-long police raids on Internet Piracy Operations throughout the city. Call 1 800 IMA SNITCH to help out!"
On the contrary, I tipping is a very good idea, well, it's the best I can think of right now considering the circumstances. In fact, I wrote an article and posted it to Kuro5hin.org a while ago now, you can look for it if you like. Also, I'm working on a technology (called Genio) that will provide true online electronic identity, one of the prerequisites I think for true large scale tipping online.
One of the things that people might get in the future is one idea I had of "direct movie merchandising," say from Pepsi or whoever. You will see an ad on the TV saying that the "Pepsi Movie" is available at your local convenience store, and also might come in the mail like those MF'n AOL disks (*cringe*). You pick up the free made movie and watch it with a slew of interactive games as well as the film.
The real kicker? Its a children's movie. So as a parent, you let your kids watch it again, and again, and again....
the world would benefit from having less...money-driven content. I appreciate we're all geeks here, but I swear to God: Leave the house(!), Drive to your nearest college campus and pick up a student newspaper. You'll find dozens of alternatives to Bad TV. If it's so bad, then why do you want so much of it for free?
Okay, time for a slightly different point of view...
I live in Europe; consequently, we often have to wait months or even years before we get series or movies I'd like to see, like 'Star Trek Enterprise' (fortunately, sometimes they get it right, like with Lord of the Rings).
So you can imagine that I'm quite happy with the current distribution of these series through the Internet. Not because I'm a pirate who doesn't give zit about the actors being paid, etc., but because I do not live in the US and that is only reason I have to wait so long. Ridiculous.
Occasionally I listen to MP3 radio streams from across the globe, simply because I like the music. And that's how it should be, what IMO is one of the futures of Internet: being able to tune in to any radio or televion station that I like, and not being restricted to 32 crappy TV stations on a crappy cable, half of which is spoken in languages I don't speak, or filled with uninteresting content.
Considering the recent surge (and downfall) in Content Control Systems (yes, that's control, not rights, as in Digitial Rights Management, as if you had any rights.... hah!) I doubt a legal, pay-per-episode system is out of the question anyway... So its either TV-napster, or waiting for a long time... It doesn't make me less of fan.
"Fix it? It has been disintegrated, by definition it cannot be fixed!" - Gru in Despicable Me.
A high-speed burner can copy 800 megabytes of data in just a few minutes.
Really? Mine can only to 700mb.
--Joey
War does not determine who is right Only who's left
This sharing of digital video content is already happening. I'm currently using ShowShifter, which is a PC based DVR/PVR software (www.showshifter.com). ShowShifter is running on my Pentium 4 PC, permanently situated in my living room, linked to my second cable box and my PC. Showshifter is programmed to automatically tape shows and compress them to Divx. I have another PC, behind my home firewall linked to my Cablemodem, that is running Kazaa/Morpheus, with a network share of the showshifter PC. All video that I tape, is available for p2p share via Kazaa. And vice versa.
The first DVD she bought was Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 1. (She's a big fan) I've only now begun to watch this series and am seriously hooked. So we spent a whole weekend watching Buffy Season 1, me asking a million questions trying to catch up, and when we watched all 12 episodes, we wanted MORE. But Buffy Season 2 on DVD doesnt come out until June.
Actually everything up to the end of season 5 is available on DVD. US produced TV series appear to in an odd situation where DVD releases are not always region 1 first...
But wait. Somewhere, locked and hidden away, some broadcaster has tapes of every Buffy episode to date, or TNG or Voyager. And I have a fast ass net connection. In fact, our cable provider gives us net access AND digital cable. So what's the fucken problem people?!?
Because cable companies simply provide a variation on broadcast television. Rather than providing video on demand.
I recorded all 13 hours of B5 Crusade last fall sometime, and to fit them on two CD's I had to use DivX and cut out all the commercials. I don't care that much about quality, it just has to be watchable. Even at 200Kbps, DivX still looked better than the VHS copy of the episodes I had previously.
Anyway, I captured at VCD resolution, keyframe once a second, bitrate cranked all the way up. Virtualdub has some pretty decent key bindings, so it's easy to get into a rhythm: find a keyframe in the black before a commercial, mark, find a keyframe in the black before the show resumes, mark, delete. Each of those steps requires one keypress. With 5 commercial breaks per episode it took almost as long to type that description of the process as it did to edit a whole hour towards the end. And I was doing all this on a TV with an 800x600 scan converted display, so visual cues were pretty poor.
I compressed the episodes I didn't like more than the ones I did, played with the frame rate (divx 3 sadly, opendivx/divx 4 was crashing on me at the time), gamma correction and a few other things, and managed to get six on one CD, seven on the other. I never posted them anywhere but if a friend asked for a copy of a Crusade episode he'd never seen, I wouldn't think twice.
That was the only real TV project I've done so far, so I expect there are kids in college out there who do this kind of thing every night, a lot faster and better quality than I ever could. I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss that article, because I think it's already happening now.
I'm sure I'm not the only person who enjoys sitting back on the couch and not moving until I've consumed all manner of media but with these PC based PVRs you need a telescope or something to see the interfaces from your couch (not to mention an oversized mouse pointer to control it).
But I've found ShowShifter!!!
Have you guys seen this? It's at www.showshifter.com
It's got all the PVR stuff: Record, pause, networking etc and a program guide, but it's UK only at the moment. It's got a codec independent engine so you can use whatever you want and if you've got a low processor speed like me you can recompress after you've recorded files.
But the big difference is ShowShifter provides a single interface for all your media: TV, DVD, CDs and MP3s and it's all designed to be used with a remote (I use a keystroke USB remote). In other words I can get my traditional lazy home theatre experince with my PC.
So now I can sit on the couch and watch, pause etc TV, play DVDs and listen to music and even switch the PC off without getting off my butt.
WooHoo!!!