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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.""
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.
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?
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."
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?
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...
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
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.
I'm the email admin where I work and (apparently) you'd be surprised at the garbage people try to email. I finally had to put a block on move attachments to stop them from coming in. The largest one I say trying to get in was just over 100mb and our ISP was allowing it. Since the ISP wouldn't block for me I just up my sendmail to stop anything over 10mb. On top of that I also filtered the .mpg, mp3, avi and other movie type files that they keep trying to clog our system up with.
For me, "PC" stuff has included finding and downloading the banned Puerto Rican Day Parade episode of Seinfeld (with WinMX), converting it to MPEG-1 and burning a VideoCD of it so that my wife could watch the episode on our DVD player, since she missed the only airing on TV. She refused to sit at the PC to watch the episode!
>But, the same thing can happen to TV now if it all goes free
I seem to recall a strange time... I think they called it the "60's" "70's" or "early 80's", I can't remember which. At that time all TV was free to anyone.
I don't recall this being seen as a serious impediment to making money, however. I'm sure there were different economic forces at play then. Like giving the people what they want and then they'll watch the ads. You know, like ads that aren't so loud you wear out the mute button, or so long you can make a pizza while you wait for them to end, or so obnoxious you turn to another station each time they advertise the latest in feminine hygiene problems? And programs that are popular, action packed, and varied, like A-Team, Airwolf, Mission Impossible, and MacGyver; in contrast to being nothing more than offensive standard grade pablum, like AllyMcBeal or [insert latest crappy sitcom ripoff where some lame ass actor comes out of the closet here] or [insert stupid show where everyone risks their life for a crappy prize] or [insert latest "real life" TV show]? I seem to recall that at this time music video station showed (gasp!) music videos! And that 2 hour movies weren't cut to 1 hour!
>Hey, who needs cable? You can just get stuff off the 'net.
Who needs cable indeed? My BUD dish picks up all sorts of commercial free wildfeeds (makes Enterprise worth watching!) 100% legally. My 40 ft. offair antenna picks up the other 50% of programming worth watching. And you legally can watch DirecTV for free in Canada, for the 1 or 2 stations that you just can't get (period -- they aren't on Canadian satellite, or Canadian satellite only offers an inferior version -- thanks CRTC!).
I haven't paid for programming in months, and I've been doing it legally. I even get the same selection of programming that most in North America enjoy, probably more (I get the Nasa channel...). Not that it matters much, because I won't be watching a big name network TV show at all this week (they put the SuperBowl on instead... I guess that is actually popular, though, so I can't complain too much about that). Maybe I'm just living in a time bubble where TV doesn't suck?
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
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
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.
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
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
In Canada, it is legal to stream (reboardcast) TV on (with full commericals) for timeshifting. There was a court ruling on it for a couple of TV streaming website.
Looks like copyright issue is where the law is drafted by MPAA.
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.