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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!!
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.
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
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
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.
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
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
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....
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).
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?
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?
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
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...
Who said anything about being open? You have to pay for the software and it doesn't run on Linux!
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.
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 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.
And with all this extra time cutting out TV gave you you chose to spend it trolling on Slashdot. Congratulations.
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.
Tired? Go to sleep and watch the rest of the game after you get some.
The neutrality of this sig is disputed.
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.
I have a CD binder full of anime fansubs that are not otherwise available in the United States, obtained from Usenet, IRC, and in a few cases, Morpheus.
Now some people will complain about anime, but I find it far superior to and more entertaining than NA television.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
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?
I read an interview in Time (or People, not sure) that asked the creators for their thoughts on the sharing. They thought it was a good way to get the word out and to build a sizable viewership, but they hinted that they weren't going to let their profits be obliterated.
I'm still not entirely sure what to feel about format-shifting. I mean, I do have CC on my cable subscription, and I do watch SP on my telly. But I can archive shows on VHS and convert to DiVX, right? I guess it's the distribution that gets the lawyers buzzing...
GTRacer
- Still, Grok is easier than setting the VCR...
Defending IP by destroying access to it? That makes sense, RIAA/MPAA. Go to the corner until you can play nice!
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.
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!
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.
They usually do a followup of 24 on thursday or friday nights. (more than once I have missed a Tuesday showing -- only to catch up on Friday...errr...I guess I could use a Tivo.)
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
> 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
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.
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."
--
dman123 forever!
Filtering out the -1s and 0s since 1999.
I have no sources for this except that I remember seeing it months before South Park aired.
Anyway, as long as they keep airing it on TV I'll keep watching it, no matter how many episodes I have on video, so there's not much much danger of their profits being obliterated. They are much more likely to be squashed by a 900ft tall Barbara Streisand robot. No, really, you wouldn't believe Babs when she's mad.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
>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
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
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.
"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."
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.
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."
Try searching for ":00". Can't be many shows with that in the title. I haven't tried it, so there may be other problems.
__
Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
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.
I agree that the studios have over-valued their content. You've got to wonder, though, what Lucas got when they aired Episode 1 on Fox not too long ago. A similar deal could be made with the website too. Instead of having one grande website, you have a bunch scattered around the country. Maybe they have a scifi-server that's in your area that shows a bunch of your favorite shows. They show you fewer ads, but they're targeted to scifi stuff in general. They pay the studio for use of the shows to drive their ad model, just like TV studios do now.
In essence, it'd be using the web to transmit content instead of using the airwaves/cable/satellite, the main advantage being video on demand, and highly focused demographics.
Makes you wonder why TV Stations aren't trying this now. As it is, I find being able to get the news streamable from around the country is very useful. Now entertain me with it!
"Derp de derp."
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
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.
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
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.
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
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?
I have a rec room with big HDTV for watching TV.
Good for you. Now, I *don't* have a big HDTV, nor do I have the room for it, nor do I feel like wasting that much money when I've got other priorities in life. A cheap $40 wintv card is a better investment for what *I* do than a $4000 TV.
And I'll bet I still get better DVD resolution with my DVD-ROM and cheap 21" CRT than you do on your penis-size-compensation TV. :)
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
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.
Not to mention that the TV, movie, and (music) recording industries themselves displaced earlier, well-established forms of entertainment: live theater (stage plays, vaudeville, circuses, you name it) and symphony orchestras, for instance. Imagine if the affected businesses had successfully sued Edison et al. for destroying their business models.
``Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators.'' -- Richard Dawkins
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.
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."
Get yourself a DVD player. You can get one that will play VCDs/SVCDs. Check out www.vcdhelp.com - it'll tell you about compatible players and has just about every Howto you'll ever need.
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!"
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.