Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
> 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
In case you are looking for episodes of tv shows, then check out edonkey available here. I have been using edonkey for a few months now, and i have always found more stuff on edonkey than on any other network (kazaa/morpheus included). Also there are a few sites on the net which give out edonkey links which u can use to download verified files! There is a linux client available. Check out www.sharereactor.com for a guide on using edonkey along with lots of links!!
Under that logic, we should've been worried about the manufacturers of carriages and whips when the automobile came on the scene. How about all the people who ground away at lengthy calculations to produce mathematical tables and such whose jobs were eliminated by computers?
The entertainment business will either adapt to change or fall by the wayside.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
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 was under the impression that people were pirating satellite signals meant for the local affiliates which don't contain commercials. And there was the added bonus that the affiliates get the show before it airs. One Day Crack, anyone?
Bite the hand.
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