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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.""
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!!
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
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.
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
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
How many have you ever made available for people to download from you?
I think that answers your question.
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?
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.
Doubt it. The reason i see it happening is that with TV shows, there is no way for me to go out and purchase a DVD with Futurama or Invader Zim or whatever on it. Futurama MAY be released on DVD years down the road, but there's not a high likelyhood- And Zim, nickelodeon wants to throw away; they don't see it as a moneymaker at all- Yet there's no way in hell there will be a DVD release of it.
That's the problem these media moguls need to think about. Many People /WANT/ their teevee shows available for purchase. I sure as hell do.
get 0wned. irc.w30wnzj00.com
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.
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.
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 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