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.""

Comments

Who E-mails Movies?

[Sentry21]

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

Re:Who E-mails Movies?

[Tackhead]

> y 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?

Obviously a question from someone who's never had the, uh, "pleasure" of administering a network at a company with something called a "marketing department" ;-)

Digital Acid Bath?

[Brit Aviator]

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.

Whre is the creativity?

[lorcha]

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.

Re:Whre is the creativity?

[WNight]

The printing press simultaneously made a market for books and threatened the newfound livelihood of the authors.

Without the printing press you couldn't have a career as an author. Authors had patrons who paid them, but not for each book, instead they paid for the originals.

With the printing press came the idea of selling many copies, and eventually the authors demanded their piece of the pie, but it could have very well continued such that they sold their work up front and the publishers took the risks and made the money.

I don't know why people assume that it's a natural law that authors get royalties. Should architects get royalties from each person who uses their building?

If we hadn't developed copyright, something else would have come along.

Any Day Now We'll Have...

[Greyfox]

Ha ha! You thought I was going to say "Any day now we'll have the ability to store our favorite shows digitally, watch them at a time of our choosing and be able to share them with our friends who may have missed that episode for some reason."

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.)

This is more about copyrights in a digital world

[IamTheRealMike]

Sure, we can all laugh about the idea of people emailing half a gig of video to each other, or downloading them onto their PDA, or say "wow, how cool would having digital archives of my favourite tv programs be", but the real issue here is - how do media artists make a living when their product can be copied an infinite number of times for virtually zero cost?

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.

can your aunt do that?

[StrawberryFrog]

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.

What we already have

[roystgnr]

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.

The downfall for the MPAA & RIAA

[linuxrunner]

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.

Re:This is more about copyrights in a digital worl

[Jeremi]

how do media artists make a living when their product can be copied an infinite number of times for virtually zero cost?

They can rely on good-will tipping from their fans (see .sig, below), or fund themselves from their day jobs. You may think that's unacceptable, but I don't -- I think the world would benefit from having less professional/corporate/money-driven content, and more amateur/semi-pro content.

Just MHO.

Not an issue until bandwidth increases for all

[Fantastic Lad]

I don't know what the percentage of web-users on 56K is, but I tend to think it's still at least half.

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