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Networks and Studios Against PVRs
HiredMan sent in an LA Times story talking about more suits against PVR makers
like Replay and Tivo. The most bizarre quote to me is that the
suit argues that "it's illegal to let consumers record and store shows based on the genre, actors or other words in the program description." Huh?
Next thing you know they won't allow people to take snapshots in Vegas because they're afraid people will be seeing all there is to see.
Useless opinions, worthless observations, and more!
Methinks they've spent too long creating fantasy worlds that they have decided to up and live in a self-created one.
PVR's throw a wrench into the finely tuned machine that is mainstream television. They make their money from ads, and the more people sitting through those ads, the more money they make. Well, what happens when advertising firms start paying channels less because there are less people actually viewing the show than recording it? You can guess that the channels will be pretty pissed off. They're just trying to protect a source of money there, really.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Isn't this the exact same lawsuit (well, almost) that the movie and tv studios waged when the VCR came out in the 70's? So, are these guys just sore losers or something? This isn't flamebait, I'm just wondering why, basically, they admit VCR's are ok, but not what is essentially a digital VCR with extras?
OK... take the PVR away. We will still do what we are doing now - taping and blowing by the commercials. We watch a few programs eah week, have the VCR programed to nab them, then we watch them COMMERCIAL FREE on the weekend WHEN WE WANT TO WATCH THEM. The only nice thing about PVR is the quality and the ability to pause real-time.
I guess the networks are pissed more that they didn't come up with it first.
"If you are on fire you can just stop, drop, and roll. If you fall into Lava you are just dead." - my 5yr old daughter
Why is it that every large corporation or entrenched business needs to be so afraid of change. Did 8-track kill music revenues? How about tape? MD? CD? MP3? Nope nope nope nope. It simply amazes me how afraid most folks are of change. Don't they realize that without change things don't get better? I see this time and again in all facets of life.
A lawsuit by the Buggy Whip Manufacturers Association against the automobile industry, because the change from carriages to automobiles has decimated their markets. The Horse Manure Shoveler's Association is expected to sign on as co-plaintiff.
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
Seems like an industry that hasn't heard of the term: "value-added".
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess? - Joshua (Wargames)
Mine just died.........it fails......it sucks.
it is an AWESOME box but just failed, little tweaks and it would rock.
pretty cool but gotta find a better way to archive the data.
D~y
As consumers who get the television free for recording on our VCR's, we should have the right to record on whatever medium we want. The whole idea that the companies are against is the nice fact that we don't have to watch the crappy commercials. This feature was ALREADY included in VHS, just with a little more effort. Control of what we watch is the issue here, not the actual practice of recording. Total crap if you ask me.
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
Users don't need to know when "Friends" is on.
Neither do I, but the rest of America makes sure I do. =P
"Anonymous Coward" is for whistleblowers, not unpopular opinions.
The REAL fear is that they failed to forsee where the future was (obviously) heading, and are now suing to stall and slow down developing tech in order to figure out how they can take control of it. Heaven forbid consumers have control over their own entertainment. Just another ploy of the Man to conrol that which shouldn't have been theirs to begin with.
Just my two cents.
I don't find myself too often creating an "archive" of shows, but instead using these devices to time shift. When I used to use my VHS, I would always skip ads anyway.
I am more than happy purchasing copies of shows I really want to keep a copy of (HBO, PLEASE release season 3 of the Sopranos soon). It seems none of these shows are from the broadcast networks anyway. I suppose when these kinds of devices are outlawed, only outlaws will take their linux boxes, add a good video card, and use Open Source software to do this....
That this case will invoke the DMCA at some point?
Netjak.com independent reviews of domestic & import video ga
I think I am going to start short selling all digital content companies pretty soon. With the PVR technology, the ad revenue model of broadcast television is a dying business model. Maybe all TV channels will be carried over cable and cost money in the near future. All the ones that you would want to watch, that is.
Nobody's suing people who actually infringe copyrights anymore. Everyone is suing people who make devices...
True. They aren't going after all those who actually infringe copyrights, since that would number in the millions. Instead, they are going after the makers, for contributory copyright infringement, much like the way Napster was sued. Napster itself did not violate copyright, but its users did, and Napster provided a convenient way to do it.
In the case of PVR's, its a little different, since fair-use does allow for time shifting, IIRC. It's the sharing of the "perfect digital copies" that the industry fears.
They are suing device-makers as a preventive measure. Without these devices, many will go back to using VCR's to make imperfect copies.
I'm not afraid of falling, it's the sudden stop at the end that frightens me.
This isn't about a newer technology replacing an old technology. It's about new technology circumventing breaking copyright law (rebroadcasting content).
What does editing commercials out have to do with copyright protection? I can understand having a problem with sharing movies but sharing TV shows that broadcast for free seems just a tad over the top.
Here, you can have this free product but you may not give it to others.
Cat
...who fucking cares? TV sucks anyways. Networks are cleverly blending it all together such that you can't tell the lamebrain programs from the commerical for Pepsi and Burger King. Do yourself a favor and go read a book. Preferrably one that'll help you survive when the Enron capitalists fuck the country down the drain and ship your job to someone in the Cambodia who'll pound keys for 5 cents an hour. Think I'm joking? Turn the set off and open yer eyes!!
Will they make a law that once you start watching a show, you can't turn the station when an advertisement comes on? C'mon this is silly.
The ONLY ads people watch on TV these days are the ones on during the superbowl. Everyone just changes the channel to avoid commercials.
Networks have no basis to claim they are losing advertising money to DVRS because even without DVRs no one watches them to begin with we just change the channel .
Silly.
The networks are scared more then likely. Speaking as a VERY HAPPY TiVo owner I can say that my viewing habits have changed dramitically. I only really watch what I want to when I want to and I don't EVER watch commercials (fast forward is great) and I sometimes don't even know what station the program is from.
So the problem the networks have is they end up basically showing programs for free, so advertisers are probably applying pressure (ie threatening to pull sponsership) unless the networks fix the situation (ie sue PVR companies into the ground).
Personally, if it becomes illegal to use a TiVo or TiVo gets shutdown, I will stop watching TV, heck I have already stopped going to the movies (boycotting the MPAA) and I don't buy any music (boycotting the RIAA) might as well stop watching TV and just read.
they more afraid of people recording the shows or more so on loss of advertising revenue?
More people with the device skip the commericals, same as with vcr, except with the later, one must hit the fast forward button. Even with commerically available video, you generally see a bunch of ads at the front, especially those from Blockbuster (renter or otherwise).
I agree this PVR trend has gone quite far enough! If we continue to let people use these "magic boxes" to record TV shows, pause them, skip the commercials, or pretty much view the shows as they want to view them, then its only a matter of time before we slip into total anarchy!
It's a snowball effect....even today, I've been hearing rumors of people that buy blank reels of magnetic tape and put them in short, wide, black boxes to record shows when they're not home! They even use other buttons on their new-fangled "remote controls" other than Play, Pause, and Stop."
Someone stop this insanity before the child-actors from "Different Strokes" become destitute and are forced to rob convenience stores!
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
...it'd be illegal to watch shows based on the genre, actors or other words in the program description. There would be only one channel. Advertisements 24 hours a day, except, if we're all good little sheep, we might get a half hour of news & traffic reports at 6:00 am and 6:00 pm.
I am the very model of a modern major general!
I can just imagine that in a few years time, we'll have the same issues at the movies...
me: Hi, I want one ticket to that new Natalie Portman movie.
movie guy: Uh. Sorry sir, you are only allowed to specify the number of the cinema and the time it's playing.
me: Ok, where do I find that out?
movie guy: Sorry, we are not at liberty to publish that information because it gives away the titles of the movies.
Nevrar
Actually, meta-information is all the rage, in science and in consumer data. So, if they establish that precedent...
"It's illegal to let companies record and store people's profiles based on the location, income or other words in their profile."
My goodness, we could eliminate demographics entirely!
A.
The most disturbing part of the story is that they claim deleting commercials is violating the copyright.
So, here's my prediction (guess I shouldn't be handing them ideas, but someone's bound to come up with it someday anyway, or probably someone has already):
In the future, we will have TV shows where you are forced to watch commercials. Something like: to view the second segment of "Friends", you have to enter the code flashing on the screen during the Pepsi ad that was aired after segment 1.
This should be perfectly feasible (technically), especially once everyone has a PVR.
I guess I should patent this idea...
MSN 8: Now Microsoft even has bugs in their ad campaigns.
"it's illegal to let consumers record and store shows based on the genre, actors or other words in the program desc" Huh?
You see, the genre is copyrighted by Miriam-Webster and the network executives are fighting for them out of good faith, becuase they understand that unless Websters protects their copyright, they will lose their trademarks on the English language. The actors/actresses' names are copyrighted by their parents, unless, of course, the parents picked the name from a name book, or in the event that they named the child after somebody else, in which case the copyright would be for that person's parents. However, copyrights only last for 70 years, so if your name is John XXIVth, then you're probably alright, and can use the name without violating any copyrights. And the words in the program description below to TV Guide, of course.
Now the questions remains, why would NETWORKS fight to protect somebody else's rights?
And here's my theory: banning these aren't that big of a deal, because only geeks use PVRs and geeks are hackers, and therefore anarchist terrorists and against the glorious US government, and they shouldn't have any laws anyways. So of course, this would go through the courts relatively easily.
However, they need to protect their ingenious lines in movies, like "Dude where's by car?" or "Alrighty then" which have been relatively common phrases for pubescent teens and dumbshit americans. However, they know that there are far too many average Joes that they could not win that kind of court case right now, so they are slowly leading up to it.
Be cautious, be very very cautious. Bad vibes are in the air.
Oh, and IANAL, DTWISS, BBB, YYY, L8R
Actually, I think that PVRs are less of a threat to purchase of TV shows than VHS would be. It's a lot easier (and cheaper) to archive programs long-term on VHS tapes than to store them on a hard drive. Most PVRs are used for time-shifting and viewing once or twice, not long-term storage. I suppose folks could start burning CDs or DVDs with content from their PVRs, but that's likely to be a pretty small minority. I think the bigger concern here is the commercial skipping aspect. Notice that the Tivo boxes that get sold through AT&T Broadband don't have the "commercial skip" button on the remote? If I were a network, I'd be worried too. If there are fewer eyeballs watching the ads, then eventually revenue's going to drop, but the costs of production stay the same or increase. Not an easy problem to solve. As clumsy as the broadcasting industry can be, in fairness, they have a real problem on their hands. The business model that's worked for 50 years (programming's free, you just have to sit through the ads) is starting to break down, and it's unclear what will replace it. Remember, there's no divine right that obliges the networks to create and broadcast The West Wing, or whatever - if we can't find a way to ensure that doing so is profitable, then it ain't gonna happen.
This is BS as "Fair Use" is well established. It's an obvious extension of technology to use hard drives instead of video tape, and computer searchable guides instead of paper guides. If anything, you would think that studios would WANT people to watch their bad movies / shows. What they are REALLY pissed about is the ability of people to fast-forward through commercials.
Frankly, if there is a show I want to watch, I let tivo record it and watch it later as commercials are just too annoying (one of the worst offenders is TNN which turns a 1:45 movie into 3 hours. Who the hell is willing to put up with that?)
Tivo and friends are are pure time-shifting devices. The don't have the ability to save off to an archive except by playing the movie and recording it with a VCR. If you are going to do that, you might as well just have recorded the damn thing with a VCR to begin with.
If they really don't want people to record by name, actor, director, they also need to sue TV Guide, all the newspapers in the US, movie trivia sites, book authors and publishers, film / entertainment magazines, etc. who also publish this info.
The upshot of all this is that the functionality is readily available and easily implemented and consumers overwhelmingly love it when they try it out. The network execs can kick and scream and throw their little tantrums all day long, but they will have to adapt to times or go out of business. This has always been the case and it will always be the case.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Whether you like it or not, TV is not a free service. You pay for it, either directly or indirectly; that is, in order for you to have something to watch while you atrophy your motor skills, someone has to bring it to you, and that someone wants to get paid.
Oh? That's not good enough? You don't like that you can't control the scheduling of the programming so that you can skip the ads, thereby avoiding compensating the TV providers the way they deserve to be? This isn't really an issue of fair use, because we all know that the actual money you pay to bring the content into your home does not alone pay for the content. Watching the ads (and the predetermined scheduling is important to the TV providers, as they map their ads according to time and demographic) is part of your payment- fair use does not permit you to skip the part of the payment that you dislike.
visit the hwky website for a lyrical genius infusion.
How is using a DVR to skip commercials any different than just flipping to another channel to avoid a commercial? It isn't. I don't understand this. No one watches commercials regardless if they dont have a VCR, DVR etc .. Hell, during the superbowl I flipped around because I didnt want to see that junk.
I think that a lot of the value on TV for advertisers is created by people just turning on the tube when they have no specific plans of what to do. They channel surf here and there, sometimes never pick a show, and as a result, manage to see plenty of ads on plenty of channels.
(And have you ever noticed that when one channel goes to ads, all the other major networks seem to do so as well? I suspect they designed it that way so even though you may switch away, someone else on another channel will switch and see the ad that you missed.)
The ability to pick out what is wanted by category and then circulate such things between friends obsoletes the practice of channel surfing, since the machines do the harvesting of choice shows for you. Since this can already be combined with the ability to strip the ads from the content, the PVR technology could bring channel surfing into obsolescence.
This would be good for us because we spend less time wasted with ads, TV guides and watching things we don't want to see, and more time watching the shows we like (probably saving some time every day to do other things.)
This would be bad from the TV Network and Hollywood's point of view because it devalues regular TV airtime and ad-time, thus earning the networks less ad-revenue. It would also be bad because people would be less likely to get hooked into new shows (thus, Hollywood shudders) since they would not be surfing or seeing the ads.
No wonder the networks are fighting this tooth and nail. They (very rightly) see it as a threat to their survival. Heaven forbid that they be forced to design a new business model. (Hmm ... now what other industry is waking up to the necessity of this kind of change?...)
I think the tivo is cool, but I really dilike devices which require subscription services... seems like we should demand simplicity and independence.
As long as these companies continue to make devices that connect to central servers and require the company to be involved in my life beyond the purchase, then the devices will continue to be fundamentally flawed in my view and I will have trouble defending them against even these frivilous law suites.
Computers should empower people not subjugate them.
Despite the doom and disaster rhetoric that the studios greeted the personal videocassette recorder with in the 70s, these days most of the studios derive a substantial amount (sometimes the majority) of their income from home video sales and rentals.
They apparrently have a hard time taking "yes" for an answer.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
In 1984, the SCOTUS ruled that VCRs are legal -- with a majority of only one vote. Everything else from the Eighties is repeating, so it doesn't surprise me that the studios try again. Welcome back.
Interesting phrasing here. It seems to imply that recording the entire thing with commercials is OK, but skipping commercials violates copyright.
That in turn would mean that it's not just the show - it's the entire presentation of the show, with each specific commercial at that point, that is the entire "show". I think Domino's would be rather surprised, though, to find their copyright was swallowed up by Ally McBeal's production company.
One also has to wonder if this means that when a local tv station (Hi, Global!) replaces the national ads with their own, are they committing copyright infringement by making a derivative work?
(yes, I know it's taking it to an absurd conclusion)
You know, the death of television has been direly predicted each time one of these "TV enhancers" has debuted.
Betamax will kill TV
Cable service will kill (network) TV
Videogames will kill TV
VHS will kill TV
Rentals will kill TV (and movies)
Internet will kill TV (and movies and music and the American way blah blah blah)
Now PVR's will kill TV
OK. So why hasn't TV died yet? We've been TRYING to kill it, but it just won't die. Maybe we're not trying hard enough. Lord knows that if Network TV died, I certainly wouldn't miss it, and I doubt the rest of the world would miss it either.
Just let the model die and a newer more better model will emerge. Guaranteed.
I'm no PVR expert, but I believe they know when commercials come on so you can skip right over them - on VCR's u eithere have to hit stop and record a lot or fastforward through the commercials, a lot more effort than just skipping them all together.
This is the price we pay for "free" tv. If you don't want ads, you're going to have to pay for it, because no network CEO is thinking, "let's make shows for free!" They have a bottom line, and ad space is how they meet it. I guess product placement inside of shows is going to become more of the norm to counteract PVRs, so more Trunman Show-esque plugs, which could be a good thing if they're done with some regard to the show that is being aired, IMHO.
F-bacher
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
Stuff like this really scares me. I have had my TiVO for a couple of months and I have to say it was truely the BEST $200 I have ever spent. I never watch Live TV anymore, nor do I worry about missing my favorite shows. I watch Enterprise friday nights when I come home from the bars, and ER saturday morning while I eat pancakes. What really scares me is if the studios win, I lose big time. In college I use to stay up late studying because I didn't want to miss a show (ER for example). You might argue that is a stupid reason, but screw that. I worked damn hard and if I wanted to enjoy 1 hour of TV so be it. The problem was, I hated having to enjoy it whenever the TV Guide said so. Now that I have an extremely active lifestyle, I still watch the same amount of TV, just when I want to.
Not to mention I don't even know where the heck my VCR is. I'm pretty sure it moved across the country with me, but I'm not certain.
BTW, I think its funny that Studios are getting upset about this. How many times have you heard "TiVO" in a show this programming season? I know Fox and NBC have plugged it a couple of times. I know Friends, Will & Grace, and Undeclared have plugged it. AND if you look in the girl's apartment on Friends, you'll see a Silver TiVO sitting next to their TV. Huh.
just sit back, relax and watch it all go to hell.
When it comes right down to it, the broadcasters accepted the existence of VCR's only because a judge made them accept it. If the movie studios and broadcasters had their way, VCR's couldn't record, merely playback things (and preferably in a way that causes them to wear out and require replacement).
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
"What difference does it make how I do it?" Wood said. "The dilemma is, the technology is turning the business model upside down. But that doesn't mean it's copyright infringement."
The media companies only care about forcing you to watch what they want, when they want, how they want. Just as with aural media companies and MP3s, the visual media companies are missing the boat. They're too locked into the current business model to want to change.
The record companies blew it with MP3s. Most people I know used Napster/Morpheus/Bear Share to find music that they either couldn't get in their own contry, or were previously unaware of (found through a keyword search). This, in turn, would lead to more music sales. The record companies panicked. They got scared and attempted to close off what could have been a promising new business channel.
Now it's the turn of the tv/film studios to resist change. I have a TiVo. I love my TiVo. When a friend sees a cool show, he tells me about it, and I tell my TiVo to look for the repeat. This is convenient for me, and what the studios are missing is that I JUST WATCHED MORE TV THAN I NORMALLY WOULD HAVE. Isn't that what they want as an end result? You'd think so.
There is no such thing as new media, only new ways to consume it. Apparently, we're not allowed to choose how we do it...
...when the market has become saturated. American tv has become oversaturated with advertising...you have adds every 5? minutes, while in Europe (or at least in the Netherlands) add-breaks are either 10 minutes (prime time) or 20-30 minutes appart. We dont mind the adds, also because most adds are of a good quality, and thus are 'enjoyable' to watch (except for detergent and sanitary napkin adds, but there are limits to what can be made enjoyable :)).
So the advertisment agenies have ruined their own market, by putting out too much adds, causing resentment and thus paving the way for methods of circumventing their adds. Result is loss of revenue, and thus maybe even leading to the death of quality tv, as there will not be enough money anymore to put out quality shows.
Remember, there is no free tv. Tivo might be great, but if it catches on, either license fees will have to go up (way up, to compensate for the billions lost in ad-reveneu), or quality (as it is) will go down...
If the networks are against PVRs it rather strange the Sky, the UK Satellite network, provide their own PVR system (at extra charge) which allows you to record one programme while watching another.
Look, the article only mentioned commercials once, and in passing. Thats not the issue here. I mean, what the hell does Universal care which commercials you are watching? They want the revenue from the movies and shows - that includes VCR, DVD and royalties from pay networks.
What they're more worried about is the fact that you can record and store digital quality shows and movies. That means, that they think they will lose revenue from all the folks who would normally buy the Simpson's DVD, but instead catalog all the episodes on a hard drive somewhere.
What they don't realize is that people are not likely to do this nearly as much as they think. Movies often come out on DVD before they come out on pay TV, I believe that the benefits of the DVD far outweight the value of taking the movie from HBO and storing it somwhere on a disk. I also believe that most people who would buy a Simpsons DVD set would still buy one, owing to the fact that syndicated episodes are cut for time. In short, people who normally would buy these DVDs would still do so, regardless of TiVo.
Yes, these lawsuits are useless, and generally a waste of time. But ever since the beginning of time, the industry has been unable to keep up with technology - and running to the courts has always been the great equalizer.
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The most replayed item in the superbowl, according to Tivo, was the britney spears commercial. (link to news story)So, perhaps if better commercials are made, then people will watch them over, and over, and over again...
this lawsuit is another nail in the coffins of major networks and broadcasters.
i'm looking forward to the day when I can *order* exactly what show(s) i want (ad-[mostly]-free), have it stored digitally and be able to view it/them whenever i want (for whatever period of time is reasonable). this way, selecting by "genre" or "title" will be a "feature" and "service".
smaller production shops might even be able to schlep out stuff on their own w/o the need to suck up to the big boyz.
$40-$100/month for cable/satellite access for the crap that's on most of the channels is absolutely insane. yes, the PVr's help sift through some of this, but i don't think going the extra step of pay-per-show will hurt PVR's, just make them more useful.
it will also get rid of alot of worthless airtime and perhaps generate even better programmes.
Mind the gap...
Q. Minimum and Maximum download times outside of local network (i.e. How long will it take to send a recording from my home in CA to my mother in NY?)
A.The minimum and maximum receive times depends upon your transfer speed from your broadband connection, which varies by broadband type, provider, location, etc.
For reference purposes, in general, under ideal conditions with 128kbps uplink:
30 minutes @ standard quality = 8 hours
60 minutes @ medium quality = 32 hours
2 hours @ high quality = 96 hours (4 days)
Ouch!
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
This has been mentioned EVERY time this PVR stuff comes up,
BUT what about a computer with a PVR like program and a TV capture card???? This has been out for YEARS and you can just send your friend/family with a computer the MPEG that you recorded...
CS majors, we are the geeks that run it all. Without us things die.
If one of the problems is they don't want people to record video without even knowing what channel it's on shouldn't they logically file suit against any medium that distributes channel guides? You could conceivably use OCR to read the print from of TV Guide then put that in a computer and use that to program your VCR (note this applies even to VCR's let alone PVR's). You'd never know what channel anything is on. I suppose the TV industry would have us randomly bounce around through channels looking for something interesting to watch, sounds like hell to me.
"The dilemma is, the technology is turning the business model upside down. But that doesn't mean it's copyright infringement."
That about sums it up for Napster as well as TiVo. New technology has basically made the old product no longer tenable. The only real complication is that since it removes the potential for the studios to make money at it, then no one will make any new content at all.
END COMMUNICATION
I know is off-topic, but I am guessing that there are a lot of people here that love family guy and do not want to see it go away. I saw this petition for Fox to keep it alive and I thought some people might be interested in it. http://www.petitiononline.com/savefg2/petition.htm l
I can't beleive how shortsighted these people are being. Its all FUD.. If they would look past their fears they would see the huge potential of PVRs. This is the best thing to have happened to TV in a long time. I watch so much more TV now that I have TiVo. I would never go back. There are plenty of ways for networks to take advantage. Put obscure shows with cult followings on at 4am when time is cheap, doesnt matter since PVR users can just get it and watch it at their leisure. Get advertisers that are highly targeted to the audiences these niche shows attract.. Etc. etc. Don't be scared of new technology. Sheesh, do they think there are tiny little people in the box acting out the shows? Technology is their friend.
I pay my cable company for the rest of my channels. And I know that that fee isn't just for infrastructure-- a big chunk of it goes to the content providers.
Not to mention that $80 VCRs with "Commercial Advance" (the brand-name for automatic commercial skipping) have been sold without (to my knowledge) a legal challenge for several years now.
TiVO, PVR, VCR, DVD-RW, CD-R
Damn...what difference does the medium make if I am STILL capturing the picture when I want to for playback at MY leisure?
Ya gotta love the last quote too:
Mark Lemley, a UC Berkeley law professor, said, "It's troubling to say, 'This thing that everybody does has been illegal for 20 years."Nobody's suing people who actually infringe copyrights anymore. Everyone is suing people who make devices," Lemley said. "The [studios] are going after the creation of new technology."
We can't sue the individual.....so we will just prevent the Creation of NEW & Better technology. Change is bad.....change is wrong....improvement is taboo......
Damn......
You keep going until you die..."Me".
... when we're not time-shifting and instead are dumping content to DVD-RWs.
The time-shifting capabilities of Tivo et al are great; between work, classes, and commutes, I lose the two or three shows on TV I'd really like to watch. A few years ago, I would have taped them. But I no longer own a VCR, so I'll time-shift them so the shows are more congenial to my schedule.
A few years from now, I might just as cheerfully dump them to a DVD for later viewing. (To a certain degree, bounded by the physical limits of single-sided DVDs, I could do it now on a Mac with a superdrive combo.) When that happens, the value of repurposed content for the studios drops to something around nil, which seriously constricts the amount of money that the studios will be willing to put into television shows.
If I were an industry suit, I'd have every lawyer in California on retainer, and holding fundraisers for every political candidate I could find, from President to dog catcher. However, from the perspective of the rest of us, the right hand of technology giveth back what the left hand taketh away; even if the media leviathans spend less on development, the tools available to smaller studios and freelancers are smaller, better, faster, and cheaper, so that the cost to put together a professional production will continue to plummet. Even now, the days of "Cameras rolling! Keep it together!" are all but gone thanks to cheap, erasable digital tape.
-Baka!
Moderator, the link above to old story about goat sex should not be rated 'informative' as it is showing as I post this.
The banner ad at the top of my browser is making me wonder: will the networks start putting banner ads at the bottom of the screen so that you have no choice to have them there?
What could be illegal about the way I choose to watch television. I am not forced to sigh a EULA to watch "Friends." Networks can place no restrictions on Television they have been beaming into homes for well over 50 year, FREE! They can not now dictate how we choose to watch it. If they are really scared PVR's are going to upset their revenue streams they need to get on board the PVR bandwagon and produce content that works in conjuction with my Tivo. (Product placement and possible web links I could get to through some future Tivo update are a couple I could think of)
Ignored Since 1973
-- A video capture card + a PC + software = a PVR. This has already been done, though primitively. You can outlaw anything you want, but you can't stop everyone (and it only takes one) from capturing NTSC/PAL content.
-- PVR users aren't generally intellectual property Robin Hoods intent on stealing from you. They just want to watch TV, and help build mindshare for your programs. If you push them underground, though, expect to see commercial free versions of your programs on P2P networks.
-- Your copy protected HDTV, D-VHS, "rights managed" media, etc. will fail in the marketplace. Should you purchase legislation to mandate them, people will simply turn elsewhere for entertainment.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
They're trying to foce the PVR makers to add "features" like this which would allow the TV station to prevent a program being recorded unless the viewer paid an additional fee.
Detroit, MI - Nations Bank, Wachovia, and Citibank have brought a lawsuit naming Ford, Chrysler, and GM as defendants. According to the lawsuit, the auto manufacturers produce powerful cars that make it easier for consumers, using the vehicles as "getaway cars", to rob banks.
A spokeswoman for the banks involved in the suit said that although the banks favor automotive advances, "new automobile technology must go hand in hand with financial institution protection" and that "the consumer should bear the full cost and inconvenience of protecting the financial interests of huge, multi-billion dollar banking empires."
We get to the crux of issue. Copyright owners want exclusive rights to control the distribution of their products. Hence:
Hence, if I could easily store a season's worth of the X-Files, why in the world would I buy the DVD compilation for $100? Everybody on Slashdot has been screaming that copyright holders, via the DMCA, want to institute a pay-per-use model. Finally, here's the proof.
Prediction: after the lawsuits clear, the studios will offer their own PVR technology solution, one that allow users to record shows, but will only store them for a certain set period of time. That way, we can't save the programs long term. They will attempt to kill the market in much the same way the RIAA killed DAT, by saddling it with options no one wants.
For the book says, "We may be through with the past, but the past ain't through with us."
The networks will continue to generate revenue through advertising by ramping up product placement within the shows.
It already takes place to a large extent (watch the 'entertainment' shows- they are infomercials for the entertainment industry)
This type of advertising is much more subtle and probably more effective anyway.
.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Taco, are you out there? The above post just got modded up as insightful. Do you really need more proof that the mod system is completely broken?
Here is an AC who says noone watches commercials. Lets examine the insight:
1. I don't watch commercials.
2. No one I know watches commercials.
3. No one watches commercials - QED
...with increased non-linearity of television. Just like web-based advertising is struggling because of its awkward fit with the medium, so will traditional commercials with on-demand or pseudo-on-demand (e.g. TiVo) television. They will simply HAVE to rethink their revenue model, which may very well end up very different from what we have today. They might try DVD-like forced viewing, where embedded codes prevent the playback device from skipping certain segments (i.e. commercials), but I don't know how well this scheme would go over with the much larger TV-watching public. Still, I fear that it's in our future, simply because it's technically feasible and requires a minimal change of revenue model.
With on-demand programming, a more natural model would be pay-per-view, but where the viewers pay the actual cost of producing the content. Of course, adjustments would have to be made at both ends: PPV costs would be higher, and content producers would have to learn to cut costs (i.e. get budgets back down to earth). It seems that one of the upshots of on-demand television will be less programming, since only saleable programs will make the list. Then again, with broadband distribution many more small shops with more modest budgets and salaries could get access to your living room, increasing the choice of programming.
Don't count the current advertiser-supported TV paradigm out yet. Commercials will still persist in live feeds like news and sports. The standard commercial in entertainment may be a dying breed, but there's plenty of other opportunities that are much harder to avoid. Watermarks, pop-ups, and on-screen banners could become more prevalent. Most significantly, product placement will surge. New methods even allow you to digitally insert products where they weren't before. Advertising will never go away completely - it'll just get more insidious and harder to avoid.
I for one don't think that a commercial-free future in which all TV either costs money (via pay-per-view, channel subscription, and show subscription) or is publicly/privately supported is such a bad thing. There's the obvious lack of commercials (yay). The direct relationship between content producer and consumer will allow more flexible dynamics of how much money will go into making a show or channel, and how much it will cost, even more flexible than theatrical films. Consumers will be much more picky about how much they're willing to spend and where they do, forcing quality to rise and less shows to be made. If channel subscription models prevail, a relative few networks will dominate with exclusive, tailored content, and syndication will boom amongst the players to reach as wide an audience as possible with lesser shows. Show formats, freed from the restraints of commercial breaks and standard lengths, will diverge. The big media players will force expensive package deals on the consumer rather than cheap individual channels... oh wait. They already do that.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
they should make a deal with them and/or change their business model. They could put programming information into their video signal (like in teletext and vps) and using those make them include commercials when recording. Since there are virtually no privacy laws in the US, they could get back detailed information about the viewing audience. Or they could find another more innovative way to make money with their material. But no, they have to throw away their money to lawyers. In the end, all the attempts to prevent people from copying something which can be heard or seen anyway, will waste more and more money.
The only way to protect their copyrighted material is to implant chips into the viewers brain, and nobody wants that. If you give people a convenient and fair way to pay for the things they like, you just might make some money, but if your only goal is to suck every possible cent out of them with low grade cheap entertainment people will always find other ways to get what they want.
***Quis custodiet ipsos custodes***
I'll bet Microsoft is some how behind this! They're pissed that UltimateTV didn't take off and they want revenge. ;)
(B) + (D) + (B) + (D) = (K) + (&)
And there are other Digital Rights Management features in Replay 4000 that have NOT yet been reported upon. I'm a Replay 4000 owner, and I can comment on some of these.
SonicBlue licenses Macrovision's technology, which is the same signal-munging technology that keeps VCR's from recording the output of your DVD player.
The interesting part is that a Replay 4000 will let you record a Macrovision-encoded program. I personally tested this by feeding the output of my DVD player into the secondary input on my Replay 4160 as a test. The Replay reproduces the Macrovision signal when outputting the program. This means you can time-shift copy-protected shows, but you cannot dub them out of the Replay onto a VCR!
Also, according to this press release, when a Replay 4000 sees that a show is Macrovision-encoded, it will not allow the user to share this program over the internet.
I think this is a pretty decent compromise between preserving the customer's ability to time-shift programs, and the program-owner's right to control copying of that program on permanent media.
And vis-a-vis the big conglomerates, this is a big change from the early Replay units. I've owned a Replay 2004 for over two years, and those early units would strip the Macrovision encoding from shows you passed through it. Thus they could be used as an intermediary for dubbing DVD's and other protected content to tape.
For this and other reasons I really think the media giants are going to fall on their face in this lawsuit. No judge is going to side with them when its so obvious that SonicBlue has made these efforts to accomodate their interests.
Why do bodies that own intellectual property insist on protecting it by trying to halt the advance of technology instead of proactively embracing technology by working with it? At this point, I feel great about downloading MP3's. And, come to think of it, TV has never been so great now that I have been using my Replay TV for almost two years now.
it's illegal to let consumers record and store shows based on the genre, actors or other words in the program description
Here are a couple other little-known legalities...
1.) It is illegal to change the channel during commercials if you've watched that channel for more than 5 minutes prior to the commercial. This one is not enforced too often because the courts have ruled time and time again that watching 5 minutes of many prime time shows already amounted to cruel and unusual punishment.
2.) It is illegal to drink Coke while watching a show sponsored by Pepsi or other Pepsi subsidiary. Likewise, if you have Coke in your refrigerator at the time, you could be cited for posession of Coke. And if you have friends over, you could be charged with posession of Coke with intent to distribute.
I Heart Sorting Networks
This is the issue here, that there is a technology that affects their level of demand, and they're going to sue to get it back. Corporations have couched the argument in terms of IP and Copyright, but under Fair Use (maybe this part has been eradicated, but is certainly under the time-shifting law) it is not illegal to hold on to recordings that you've made. The plaintiff's argument seems to center around the decrease in demand that holding onto recordings causes. This is a pervasive vector: suing to maintain market share. It's a new form of monopoly when what they want to control is your access to their content.
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
I guess I should also note that the Time-Warner stance on DVDs is to drive the price down to the point that they essentially become an impulse buy. The holy grail for Lieberfarb is somewhere around $5 to $10.
The other studios shudder in horror just thinking about that, but I think it's a viable way to keep the market (assuming you can make a profit on the deal). Even in a PVR/DVD world, I'd still be willing to buy commercial DVDs if (A) they contain content I would not normally be able to get in broadcast/cable (for example, small independent films, Japanese anime, and most foreign films), or (B) if the convenience of picking up a DVD in a checkout line outweighs the price being charged. It's the latter that T/W is betting on.
-Baka!
Ok, so let's say they chase all these companies down and kill the PVR industry. Me, wanting the functionality, but having no outlet, decides to build one from a Linux Box and a TV card (which I'm actually doing right now because I'm too broke to buy one and it's fun to hack!). If the Industry Giants catch a whiff of this, do they sue me for "manufacturing" a device?
Here's an invention that they'll probably support -- a device that forces your eyelids open and force-feeds you 2 hours of advertising a day. Any attempt to blink would be a violation of the EULA. Better yet, why don't they buy men-oriented advertising space on women's chests, they know guys are staring at them intently!
Insert witty comment here
1. If I don't watch commercials no one watches commercials
2. I don't watch commercials.
------------
3. No one watches commercials
Actually those of us with a DirecTivo record the digital signal coming from space perfectly, without ever passing analog.
Granted, the signal wa MPEG encoded at some point before getting beamed to the satellite in the first place, but it can be of very high quality.
What's scary is that I was in the lobby of a movie theater the other night, and a group of mildly rowdy people were goofing around and snapping pictures of each other. An attendant stormed up and yelled, "You can't take pictures in here. Those posters are copyrighted!"
Jeez. This isn't the US Mint you know, it was a movie poster.
Let's face it, network programming is just there to attact people to watch commercials. Pure and simple. Yes you can record stuff on the VCR and skip past the commercials but it is a pain in the butt and most people don't do it. Networks were intially worried but it didn't turn into much of a problem for them.
PVR's make it easier and more convenient. More people will skip the commercials. I think they really do have a reason to worry now. PVR's seem to modify the way that people watch TV in a way that the VCR's never have.
You can sit down for the evening and watch your programs 30 minutes delayed and easily skip through the commercials. With a VCR you had to wait until everything was finished recording before you watched it.
As these things become more common prices will drop and they will be connected to every TV in the house. It won't be long before you will be able to pick one up at WalMart for $100.
If this happens I wouldn't feel to secure if I made my living trying to get people to watch commercials.
It's called Prime Time. It's what advertisers pay them bigtime for, and when all the most popular shows get scheduled. After all, this is the time the largest target audience is going to be watching.
Now, VCRs aren't such a big deal, because they're clunky and inconvenient. Programming them is a pain. Manually recording defeats most of the point, since you still have to be there.
Throw into the mix PVRs, though, and Prime Time becomes any time. If everyone has a PVR (and they could eventually... they're cheap, and so convenient), there's no reason to schedule a show during any particular hour, since that's probably not when it'll get watched. There will be no time-based competition. Advertisers won't see the point in paying extra for any particular timeslot. By controlling the horizontal and vertical, they're getting more money, and now they see PVRs taking that away.
So everyone go get/build a PVR if you want to stick it to them.
On a somewhat on-topic note, it's really easy to build one of these things, too. The software is already there in parts, it just needs a little glue. Check out mp1e for encoding, or anything else you like such as low-bitrate DivX. Combine this with mplayer or something and a little at, cron, or various web-based TV recording stuff on freshmeat and there you've got it. I already do this all manually and it works better than TV (skipping ads is really worth it, not to mention not missing shows), and I'm planning on putting together a box with 3-4 TV cards to do this in a dedicated manner. Go PVRs.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
If the intent of intellectual property law is as stated in the US Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, which seems to me to be promoting creative innovation, how do you reconcile that with the media industry's use of copyright as an attempt to supress technological advancement?
:)
Of course, there is always the "IP law as revenue stream garuantee" school of thought.
Hey, finally, the big companies awake.
... Genlock (boo & hiss). That means that even Macrovision didn't affected it. What can you do with such a malicious intent? I'll say that the keyboard, mouse and graphical tablet are ... well... borderline. I'll close my eyes for a moment on these, please move fast!
...thing!
Come on, such destructive technologies. If I was them, I would've never allowed these to come on the market:
- The VCR (VHS and Beta alike). I mean, everything should be 35mm or maybe I'll tolerate Betamax but it should be really really only for very precise people and with confidentiality licences and everything.
- The CD-R and RW. Hey, what is this? Come on! It's SOLE purpose is to copy CDs. No one use this for legit use. If people want a compilation CD, well, take the glue and the scissors and have fun with your originals.
- The DVD-R and RW. Eek! This is satan's work for sure. Especially since it's the dawn of the dual-layer recordables, which is the absolute certain doom for every movie ever conceived.
- The Internet and networking products. I mean, such a massive group of people, all able to share files like there's nothing. I do not think that the Internet should be banned, please correct me. But FTP, HTTP, Samba, AppleTalk, Novell, Gopher and that ever elusive E-Mail should all be destroyed. It's simply too dangerous. In fact, BBSes should've never been created in the first place, simply see all that pirate software being tossed around in those (eek) underground BBSes.
- Acquisition devices. A-Ds are pure evils. Scanners, sound cards with ins, video grabbers. Since the Amiga blew that revolution offhand, it all went downhill. Hey, imagine, the video overlay of the Amiga had a
- Tape decks. Hey, tape is the worst invention of the (prev) century! Large open reel one with great quality... Or small k7 running at 1 7/8... They should've never been invented at the first time. Imagine how much the industry loses with all this crap?
...
This is a start!
They should've stopped this in its infancy!
Remove all the pencils, pens and that destructive Guttenberg
Hey, even go farther. Who said you could copy what I do? I mean, you know things when you're born and after, you should never have to learn anything else from anyone else. Especially from books (which is (c), look at the top dumbest US patents).
And you have the same basic shape as I do! What are you doing? This is (c) Me. So reproductive instinct is only a bad omen, it should be destroyed and controlled too.
WHEN
WILL
IT
STOP?
"1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0"
:)
:)
There's a very major arithmetic flaw in there, aside from the fact that you're ignoring half of the roots.
Looking specifically at the line
1=-1
it should be intuitively obvious that
2=0, or
0=-2
*sigh* You've worked at NASA, haven't you?
- Jester
I am just waiting for a Linux version of PVR's where we could write a quick scripts to filter out of the commercials:
watch Friends | rm_ads
The functionality to do these "nasty" things would not be "built" into the unit. They'll have to make my computer illegel now! And probably my brain. That'll be messy...
The only time that really matters when you watch a show is the first time, yet the Industry expects to profit off repeat viewership anyway. This is seriously impacting the assimilation of these new technologies. If they were to move to a purchase-once, watch as many times as you like model things would go much smoother for everyone involved, but the industry is too dependent to put the crack pipe of repeat-viewer-profits down voluntarily.
It started with TV. Shows were limited, and viewers often missed them at their first showing. So they started rerunning them so they could catch them later and to fill up time. And that's when they figured out that people would watch these shows more than once, sometimes even over and over. Advertising became deliberately more ambiguous, so people would start watching just to make sure it wasn't a new episode. Pretty soon the whole TV model depended on it. The same happened with the birth of VHS for movies, and with the soaring cost of "blockbuster" movies some first-run releases actually NEEDED people to watch more than once just to turn a profit.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
during super bowl sunday, wasn't a Pepsi Ad with britney spears the most replayed peice of broadcast with the game winning fieldgoal a close second. or was it the other way around. anyway, Pepsi should be glad that TiVo was there recording britney as she sang all about the Pepsi generation so that millions of Americans could watch that ad over and over again. see, without TiVo, the ad would have just went through the airwaves and kept going...into thin air. Now it's archived to be enjoyed again and again. The networks and their sponsors have nothing to fear. They simply need to make better commercials that people will want to record and watch. BTW, just because I see a commercial doesn't mean it will have any affect on my purchasing decisions. I like the pepsi ads, I still drink only coke. I like the apple ads, I still can't afford one. I've never seen a turbo tax ad, I buy it every year. This sort of industry clearly isn't a science.
Wrong, yourself. You don't have the right to free television just because the airwaves are public any more than you have a right to a free vehicle because the government supports the highway system. The networks broadcast to everyone without charging for the signal itself (think encrypted signal like premium cable for contrast). In exchange, they air advertisements to pay for their costs. This is why they feel so threatened by devices like TiVo and Replay.
Virg
I have a television. I use it to watch videos. Aside from that it sits in my apartment and collects dust. I get out and practice Yoga and Tai-Chi. I spend time with my friends. I ski on a regular basis. I like to read all sorts of things, ranging from fiction to philosophy. I enjoy a wide variety of music, and like to sit on my couch and enjoy a new CD or the radio. There is so much out there to enjoy. There is so much out there that is more enjoyable and stimulating than television. Why should I give two shits about PVRs and how they piss off the networks?
The middle mind speaks!
They don't admit VCRs are ok. It had to be taken to court.
Speaking of PVRs, which one should I buy? ;) I keep hearing good things about both, and I'm tired of futzing around with the 30-second commercial skip button on my VCR. Any suggestions?
I'm proud of my Northern Tibetian Heritage
...but this is becoming a reality. An unintentional (I can only hope) loophole in NAFTA (http://www.nafta-sec-alena.org/english/index.htm) allows corporations to sue governments whenever they act in ways that hurt profits, even when the governemntal actions are both legal and constitutional. This is done in secret, non-appealable tribunals. For more information look here (http://www.citizen.org/trade/nafta/CH__11/) or here (http://www.wtoaction.org/greenfield4.phtml) or just search everyone's friend (http://www.google.com/). It is really kind of scarey, even for one such as myself who actually believes in globalization, just not like this.
The internet isn't killing TV because it hasn't advanced far enough. Maybe the combination of several factors will kill TV broadcasting:
- Broadband internet to every middle-class home.
- An effective, secure, and private internet micropayment mechanism.
- Shows sold directly on the internet, AT A REASONABLE PRICE.
No one is going to spend $5 for a half-hour sitcom, but 50 cents seems reasonable to see it when you want it, without commercials. With piracy and replays, that might come out to about 5 cents per view -- and I'm pretty sure that's more than the show producers get from the networks.
How do we get from here to there?
Of course, the networks are going to fight this, since they get cut out of the deal entirely. And the advertising agencies will have to come up with a whole new method of brainwashing passive audiences into buying more than needed. Tough shit. "Manure shovelers suing automobile manufacturers for loss of business..."
- Sifl & Olly
- Mr. Show
- 24
- Son of the Beach
- Police Squad!
- Battlestar Galactica
-dbcWhat exactly does "Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 7.3)" prevent?
You're not kidding have you watched I Am Sam? A very good movie and all, one of the major problems being product placement which was so obvious and intrusive that it was almost painful to watch!
No, ignoring half the roots (should be) the only arithmetic error. Though the last step has 2 steps in it... I wanted to get to 1=0 at the end. 2=0 is obviously also a correct step, but 1=0 stands out as "obviously wrong". For that matter I could have left it as 1=-1, which is also obviously wrong, but I think fewer people would notice the .sig. ;) I also thought about adding at the end "=> God exists". Or maybe "=> Bush is not a flaming moron". :)
And no, I don't work for NASA (yet). ;) I'm a grad student in theoretical physics, just doing my duty to confuse the masses...
-- Bob
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
The vast majority of the viewers out there (i.e. "The rest of us") want to WATCH THE SHOW more than they want high quality video and audio. While we certainly wouldn't turn down nicer quality and will pick it over lesser, how much more money/trouble we're willing to put into better quality ranges from zero to small. I'm more than willing to put up with a little digital or analog signal degradation if it means it costs less or is easier to come by, so long as the viewing quality is acceptable.
With PVR, it's the ease of use that makes all the difference, not the quality. Videophiles (along with all other snobs) just don't seem to understand this.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
"...last time I checked, "markets" were not constitutionally protected, and neither were coporate profits or business models."
This here is the U.S. we're talking about. The whole system is designed to protect monied interests above all else, even above civil liberties. Remeber President Bush's motto, "What's good for business, is good for America." And what's bad for business...
America isn't about the people anymore - hasn't been for a long time. America is all about business.
Its true that the people's interests aren't ignored all of the time but all too often the interests of business take precedence over the interests of the people. Its human nature, the plutocracy protects itself.
Do I have the right to watch or not to watch what is being broadcasted?
When a commerial comes on, should I be forced to watch that commerial or should I have the right to change the channel, get up and get something to drink, use the bathroom, make a quick phone call, or do anything else? Should I have the right to mute the TV during commericals. Do I have the right NOT to watch a commerical?
I say yes.
The TV stations and studios can not force me to watch something I don't want to.
Oh well, it's not like any high quality programming has come out of Hollywood in a long time any how.
(Side point; I won a Tivo, and have not used it once).
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
This means the end of the TV era is near. These devices are turning everyday TV into videos, just like how I can download every episode of a certain anime on the net. I forsee big big changes. TV will never, ever, be the same.
And if we could use the Tivo like we use Hotmail or any other free internet service there would be a compromise: I.E. I'd like to record Friends and I only want to see commercials about PC's, Beer, Snack food, or vacation spots.
Then you can watch the show you want without commercials for Vagisil and still put a nickel in the networks pocket. It would even inspire the ad comapny's to make better commercials thus further entertaining us (which the goal of a PVR in the first place).
Lord knows that if Network TV died, I certainly wouldn't miss it, and I doubt the rest of the world would miss it either.
:)
Guess you haven't been watching "24."
A DMCA reference! And was totally unrelated to the topic, as well!
- Have a picture
Some people will say that PVRS allow people to skip commercials, and cost the producer money, this is a myth.
Ad prices are sett by ratings.
IF I am not a "Nelson" then whether or not I watch a commercial has zero impact on there ad price.
If I am a "Nelson" then the box on my tv tracks what I watch, it has no Idea if I am, in fact, actually watching it, or if my pvr is recording it. So the ad revenue should be the same.
What next, a going to the fridge during a commercial fee?
In fact, the studiios should get rid of there "Nelson" system, and just buy the info from the PVR providers. This will have a wider distribution, and greater overall accuracy.
Unless they don't really want us to determin what we watch...
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
See what you're missing here is it's not so much about the specifics of how consumers are not allowed to record programs, but it's about the consumers choice, or more specifically, the studios not wanting us to have any.
It's happened time and time again, most recently with CDs. The high-ups in the industries want to decide what you watch and when. If you could watch just the new simpsons you probably would, but hollywood, or fox, or whoever has decided that unless you switch stations you have to watch show X before it, and show Y right after. The chances of those shows all appealing to you for more than two or 3 half hour segments are very slim, but give the consumer the choice to watch what they want when they want it!?
This is the same reason you have to buy a cd with 1 or 2 good tracks on it and the rest (generally) "filler", and the same reason why the RIAA wants to stop people making their own cds and mixes.
This whole "share your recordings over the internet" thing reminds me of that stupid my.mp3.com service. You take a perfectly good business that is legally "sticking it to the man", and then you add a gratuitously and blatantly infringing feature to it. WTF?!?
Replay will get bitchslapped over their oh-so-clever (yawn) feature, making the whole PVR scene look shady by association.
Is somebody trying to sabotage this market from the inside?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I think somebody mentioned down below that these corporations need to evolve. It's time to find other sources of revenue. If their only salable "product" is airtime for advertisements, they're in real trouble. Every business that I know that stuck with a single product has gone down the tubes.
These are the same folks who anticipate using the free digital channels they were given to provide revenue by forgoing HDTV in many cases, and using the additional space for revenue data type services.
But the 'illegal' to copy using keywords like titles, authors... it sound more like a slap suit than copyright suit, and someone should slap back. I'd love to see them site case law on that one. It'd be like the publishers going back to the Supremes and asking to revisit the Xerox case because instead of copying a page at a copier, one can now use search engines by keyword to get that page you want for your book report or thesis and then print it on the printer. That's an exact analogy to the theory they're using.
I'd say if we ever go back to the stone age, it won't be through nuclear war as was once thought, but it'll be due to the RIAA, MPAA, Valenti (who's from that age anyway). This is all about control, and trying to get back what they lost in the Betamax case. They should get censured for filing a frivilous suit on that keyword thing, and then go from there. (standard IANAL disclaimer. I actually was prelaw, but decided early after meeting some real jerks, it wasn't for me. I see many are still practicing.)
"The lawsuits... were brought by the largest TV networks and all seven major Hollywood movie companies..."
Sony is one of those "seven major Hollywood movie companies".
Sony is also the biggest manufacturer of Tivo boxes.
Funny how only ReplayTV was named in the suit.
The settlement is that everyone now has to go out and see the movie. My favorite quote is when they're interviewing people coming out of the theater and the reporter asks one movie-goer, "So what did you think about the movie?"
His response: "I saw the shit out of it!" We laugh but who knows... it might get to that point.
Ivan
There is no graceful way to eat an egg salad sandwich.
"The dilemma is, the technology is turning the business model upside down"
:(
That last line says it all. Much like the music industry, the business model is CHANGING. Instead of trying to compete head on to this change, the existing monopolies are reacting by suing their new competition out of existence. It's unfortunate that our legal system is helping them do that. It'd be nice to see free competition, instead of who ever is the biggest (old) company that's bought the most politicians wins.
PVR's have changed the way I watch TV. I'm actually watching MORE, because there's always something *I* like on. I find it very frustrating that the big monopolies are going to end up crushing this new way of watching TV (For now.. I"m sure they'll come up with their own after all the competition has been killed off by the lawyers).
Don't you know the publishers are making a concerted effort to get rid of libraries? That's right, libraries!!! Part of the very core of educated societies. So basically, unless you're into independently published books, it's not even safe to read any more. I personally try to stick to older stuff that's in the public domain that I can download from Project Gutenburg and read on my Visor.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
"If a ReplayTV customer can simply type 'The X-Files' or 'James Bond' and have every episode of 'The X-Files' and every James Bond film ... it will cause substantial harm to the market for prerecorded DVD, videocassette and other copies of those episodes and films," the lawsuit states."
Ok, so I'm supposed to care about harm to their markets? What's better.. the government is supposed to care?! This seems like a whine to me, rather than a legitimate grievance.
As Ian Clarke once said [paraphrasing].. "If you make money by selling water in the dessert, and it starts to rain... it's time to find some other way to make money."
Well folks.. it's started to rain, and the studios are turning to the government to supply the umbrellas.
Let them get wet, I say!
"To make a mistake is only human; to persist in a mistake is idiotic." Cicero
Really, all the features that are on a PVR could be implemented in a VCR; VCR stands for Video Cassette Recorder - it's only named for the recording medium, not the other features. I think this lawsuit would would be summilarly dismissed if brought against a PVR that uses tapes to store the shows (and was referred to as a VCR).
science is a religion
Think about it - if you can punch in your favorite show/actor/subject, you'll have plenty to watch whenever you want, without having to sit there and flip through all the channels to see what's on. This means that you'll probably stick with the shows you already watch and like, and you may not bother with new shows, or whatever happens to be on at the moment. It will mean less and less to boost a show by putting it on after Friends, for example, because people will stop caring when the shows are actually broadcast.
Personally, I'm all for complete pay-per-view. I'd gladly pay a buck or so per half hour of TV, if I could whatever I wanted to watch on-demand. I can't see that ever happening though, since people would stop sitting on their asses in front of the tube all night (horrors!)
Having read the article and a little searching on the web, I came across this landmark case back in 1984. When BetaMax came out, Universal and Walt Disney sued Sony over the device, because it allowed folks to record and watch it later. This making Sony the infringer
This was deemed "time shifting" recording and through a bunch of court rulings finally was deemed "fair use"
A good article describing the court case and offering analysis is here.
Im so pissed off at TV these days. You know why there are fewer and fewer new episodes of your favorite show on each year? It's because they're paying those idiots WAY too much money for sub par acting.
I think it's about time that these actors start getting paid for what they're really worth. In the meantime, Ill record Friends on my current TIVO and fast forward through the stupid ass commercials.
Stay tuned to my next rant on why it's ok to steal music on mp3's cause the record companies screw the artists anyways.
Live web cams
Mabye the lawyers in this case are ACTUALY on OUR side and they just filed this thing in such a stupid fashion as to ensure that a legal precident gets set in favor of PVR devices.
God I sure hope so. Either that or the Gene Pool is even worse off then I thought!
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
I agree with that, to an extent. For example, I've enjoyed a couple of the ads during the Olympics - in particular, the one with the football player, the Olympic runner, the race horse, and the stock car. In fact, I even called my wife back into the room to see it because I thought it was so funny. Does it make me more likely to use a Visa card? No. But at least I didn't flip the channel as fast.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
This wouldn't necessarily hurt re-runs and here's why - better quality, no stupid logos or other crap on bottom of screen, no commercial interruptions, extra bonus stuff. Core audience would be most likely to pay for this. Can build larger audience for show, etc. Broadcast rights can still be sold for reruns - there will always be an audience for them.
In short, best way to combat PVRs is to put out a better product at a decent price - sell the whole 22 episode season on a 6 DVD set for $90 or so - immediately AFTER the end of the season. Otherwise ppl who missed are either going to record them to TiVo, ReplayTV, or just go to go to Morpheus, LimeWire, BearShare or some other P2P and get them anyway.
Copyright and Patent are NOT property rights! They are artificial monopoly rights! Geez, if even the people on OUR side keep referring to them as property rights, how can we expect to make any progress?
TV started out being ephemeral. You couldn't even tape shows to edit them before broadcasting them. Everything thing was live, sometimes with disastrous results. Soon, however, there will be millions of PVR's out there, and the possibility of them networking together in P2P fashion. Imagine storage getting cheaper and cheaper, bandwidth getting better and better (as they do year by year) and eventually, you'll have access to everything that's ever been released over the airwaves whenever you want it in digital, HDTV quality. Plus, you'll be able to edit commercials out. Bye-bye goes the need for recordings of movies or shows (Sopranos, Friends) that have appeared on TV, bye-bye goes ad revenue, bankrupt goes the industry.
The solution is for content producers to show some friggin' brains, accept that this is inevitable, and act accordingly. First off, accept the fact that anything you put on the air is gone, forever to be viewed and skipped through by people whenever they want. We no longer have a real schedule of programming, more like a pool of available shows that gets added to each day regularly by producers of content. Get rid of DVDs, Tapes, etc. We no longer need them. Get rid of commercials, which are useless now that people can skim through programs. Start using things like ESPN's bottom line to add banners of advertisment to shows while they're running (much like what they do to soccer games in Europe right-freakin-now. Change the way you do it every so often so that you can't easily code a way to strip them out, and make them unobtrusive enough that people will notice them but not hate them.
There. You now have a world where people can get much more out of TV than they do now, no one wants to ban Tivo's, and everyone still gets paid.
This tagline is umop apisdn.
Actually, even neutral ads might get watched. Assuming I've been to the bathroom and gotten my munchies, I might be to lazy to hit MUTE (or FF if its a recorded show), but as soon as a commercial annoys me, I silence it quick! That happens pretty often despite my laziness.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
PVRs might actually improve viewership and their profits, if studios were to embrace them.
... following the President's advice and volunteering more of our time ... how on earth does anyone with a life have time for television - much less the shows they want to see - at the times when they're broadcast? I don't know about you, but I watch exactly one show per week, and that is only because it is recorded on my VCR (when the network hasn't preempted it).
First of all, they let viewers get around preemption by local affiliates. How many times have you grumbled because a basketball or hockey game you'd never watch preempted your favorite show, which you had set your VCR to record?
Do studios consider time-shifting a boon or a bane? Surely, that VCR feature has held onto more viewers than it gets credit for. In these days of working multiple jobs to make ends meet, trying to give quality family time and heaven forbid
As far as building vast libraries go, it has already been said that people can do that today with the VCR. However, collecting a series actually makes people hungry for more new programming (To paraphrase the words of Harlan Ellison, when asked if he had read all of the immense number of books in his house, "Why would I want a house only full of books I've already read?"). Consider how many TV shows with cult followings the studios could keep running profitably if people could automatically time shift them from the undesirable broadcast time slots.
So, bottom line is, the studios are shooting themselves in the foot if they stand in the way of PVRs.
I already plan to buy a PVR as soon as I can get one with a FireWire interface and software for my iMac G4. Indeed, why spend $400 for a PVR with a hard drive when I've got a perfectly good one on my computer - which I and a growing number of Americans spend a lot more time in front of than the television?
Perfect digital form? What a joke. MPEG-2 is far from a perfect form -- it's lossy!!!
I have been a DirectTV subscriber for several years now and watched the visual quality degrade as they added local programming. If you don't give MPEG-2 enough bandwidth it can look very bad. Every time I hear a digital content provider chime in with a term such as "digital clarity" I transform it into "digital artifacting" and chuckle inside. The same is true when people talk of DVDs.
Funny thing is that parts of the opening ceremonies of the olympics had some very noticable artifacting (to me anyway) and I receive local programming the old fashioned way. I guess the networks are using MPEG-2 streams to feed affiliates.
I agree. There is one little problem - how do people figure out what shows they want to watch? People choose what shows they want to watch by sampling them and seeing advertisements, just like they choose which movies to watch via attached trailers and TV Ads. Word of mouth and critical reviews play a role, but it's minor and unreliable. Same goes for the premium channels and pay-per-view!
I think if ppv TV does come about, there will be a number of free channels/distributions that do nothing BUT run ads and sample episodes/pilots for other shows. Carefully chosen episodes would be offered for free for every show. Even so, when nobody is flipping channels, how will they come across them? Word of mouth will play a bigger role, but it will have to be agressively pursued.
Unconventional tactics will have to be invented. For instance, watching the preview channel or commercials may give you the chance to win a subscription to a show or channel. Studios may turn to patronage to make new shows based on consumer demand for pre-existing concepts (More Star Trek!), studio reputations (Gainax can do no wrong!), and talent (Sandra Bullock is hot!) The expectations would be much higher for such shows, though, and failure to deliver would be ugly.
There's one other problem too - viewing clubs will flourish. The more expensive, the more popular, the younger and poorer the audience, and the more cult favorite something is, the more people will be watching it together for the price of one. Even if prices are kept low, the number of subscriptions sold won't be directly proportional to the number of people watching (unless it's something really anti-social like porn), since you can't charge at the door. It's the law of diminishing returns, and they'll have to take it into account with all seriousness, because there will be an asymtotic limit to the the money that can be made.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
Well, there's paying, and then there's paying. If you watch three hours of commercial television, you are seeing about two hours of content and paying for it by watching one hour of advertising. But how many people really stop to think just how much of their time they are giving up to the advertisers? I have my "guilty pleasures" programs, and I have bought back an hour on Tuesday nights by timeshifting and skipping the commercials.
As to charging the cable and satellite providers, well they already do. A couple of years back Disney/ABC got into a pissing contest with Time Warner (houston market at least). It seems Disney wanted Time Warner to carry Disney's answer to the Cartoon Network, and was withholding rights to the regular ABC programming as a bargaining chit. Both "channels" are considered "free (advertiser supported) TV". TW stopped carrying ABC for a brief period of time and all was eventually worked out, but somebody pays for it - and my basic cable bill keeps getting raised without any change in programming that I can see. So it looks like I'm paying with cash as well.
Personally, I think that going to Video On Demand is the answer the studios/networks need. Stop selling audiences to advertisers and start selling entertainment to audiences. Of course, if I pay a dollar (I figure that would be a good fee) for a forty minute (1 hour less commercials) program, then I should be able to record it and do anything else I like with it except those actions which would prevent the shows copyright holder from selling it to other people (like sharing it with 20 million close personal friends via a P2P networks)
Of course, this is a whole new business model for the studios and they just don't adapt well. Let's see, using my example, I'd pay fifty cents for an episode of Seinfeld - how many people would it take to get the 5 million per episode that Jerry turned down?
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
I also thought about adding at the end "=> God exists". Or maybe "=> Bush is not a flaming moron".
Instead of the "God Exists" ending, how about "=> Right=Wrong => Right=Creationism" just for kicks?
The speed of time is one second per second.
The difference is: the PVR can be set up to notice the markers for commercials and NOT record them, which is transformative, not just time shifting. The PVR maker is charging you $10/mo. for this service, therefore it can be argued that they are profiting from modifying the networks' copyrighted materials. One PVR vendor also offers a service of sharing these digitially recorded shows, which is rebroadcasting transformed copyrighted material.
The judges decided that VCR's were primarily for time-shifting. Since there is $10/mo. involved, it is going to be easy for the networks to argue that there is more going on here than time shifting.
All the crap in their press release is not a valid legal arguement, it is just there to put pressure on the PVR to come to the settlment table. What the networks really want is to stop the file sharing and for the PVR vendors to remove the commercial skipping functions so you have to fast forward through them, so you at least take a look and decide if you want to watch the commercial or not.
To avoid court costs and the possibility of losing, the PVR makers will probably work something out, and that will keep only a minority of people building their own box with a 386 and linux and a TV tuner video card.
The only way nowadays to guarantee that people actually see ads it to integrate them INTO the content that people actually WANT to see... a couple examples are:
-product placement (using a certain product, or showcasing it in the content, etc.)
-TV banner ads... as much as you hate them on the web, I'm sure they're not far off for TV.
-ghost-overs... just like the ghost-image of the network logo on the bottom right corner of almost every program these days. How long until these are used for advertising?
-subliminal advertising... ok, outlawed years ago, but it is a possibility too.
SOMEBODY has to pay for your content... if it's not the advertisers, it's gonna be you, directly out of your pocket. What's the worst of these two evils?
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
While the market for entertainment may not be protected by law, there is a precedent.
Have you ever wondered why it is illegal to sell a new car online? And in Arizona, to sell most parts?
Because the automobile dealers have pushed through laws, based on their significant investment into the market which protect them. Simply because they have hundreds of thousands of dollars of inventory tied up, they are protected from unregulated competition.
And if it can happen in the auto industry, it can happen in the entertainment industry.
Here's what I expect the networks to do shortly with the advent of PVRs: Place banner ads on TV much the way they are placed on the web. I realize it might not be too difficult to program a PVR to automagically remove them, but would still be harder than to simply stop recording when ads are on. Also, networks may have a stronger suit against PVRs if they removed portions of the broadcast screen as opposed to simply not showing commercials.
So by the quote does that make VCRplus equiped in most VCR's illegal because it allows you to easily setup recording of your favorite show by punching in a simple code. Why, I could look up shows by genre on my cable box and program my VCR to record those shows, the horror, oh my God I'm stealing TV programming. Next they'll be banning TV guide for facilitating customers avoidance of bad programming and over abundant commercials.
"Do not be swept up in the momentum of mediocrity." - anon
Good call. :)
"If a ReplayTV customer can simply type 'The X-Files'...and have every episode of 'The X-Files'...recorded in perfect digital form and organized, compiled and stored on the hard drive of his or her ReplayTV 4000 device, it will cause substantial harm to the market for prerecorded DVD, videocassette and other copies of those episodes and films,"
What drek! ok, the replaytv 4000 can hold up to 320 hours at it's worst quality. If you recorded at the best ratio, you'd get something like 55 hours. The X-files has (roughly)191 episodes. Anyone see a problem here? They're not going to be recording every episode at the best quality if they plan to record anything else and their life is going to be dedicated to saving to the external hard drive....
I'm sorry but I have better things to do with my time. My suggestion to the network exec is to price the x-file DVDs in a range where it's not worth the bother of saving them to external sources.
Plus the network exec never seems to mention my favorite part....being able to get that rare one that is never played except at late night or is never availible at the store. As a fan, I'm willing to fork over the dough to get a good, clean legal copy of the stuff I love (dvd/cd/whatever.) However, it's hard to see the harm when the man isn't releasing the goods any more.
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
Want to bet as soon as the networks/PVR ompanies figure out they can sped up the progarm slightly without degrading the quality noticably, thereby adding 1 commercial every hour, we see some alliances form real quick like? Of course, the ability to stream commercials based on a PVR's knowledge of what you watch, what you skip, and your demographics wouldn't be at all valuable.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
I have! But if I can't be home, I record it. If the media industry interferes with my ability to do so, I won't see anything.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
And recomended reading for this topic would be chaper 3 of "NEXT"
Information wants to be free like speech wants to be free, not like we want beer to be free.
How is basic digital cable free. I pay those bastards $54.99 a month for what is essetianlly my desire to watch the sci-fi channel. Now if the Sci Fi Channel can't handle $54.99 a month then what is there problem?
Looked at a certain way, the whole edifice of network television along with "branding" is a device for delivering entertainment, and it's a remarkably inefficient device. You buy products, for which a sizable chunk of the price is advertising, which is allocated by highly paid marketing drones to highly paid advertising agencies, who buy airtime from TV networks, who buy programming from producers, who pay cast and crew to make the show.
Doesn't this strike anyone else as incredibly wasteful? How much inefficiency and featherbedding are we supporting by buying products we see advertised on TV?
I mean, come on, the shows I like to watch mostly cost less than $200,000 an episode, and have an audience of around half a million weekly. I'd pay dime, or even a quarter, per episode of Farscape, which would be far cheaper for me than paying $2 more for a box of Tide, *and* would be more lucrative for the producers.
The reason why the networks are scared is because this whole house of cards is built on their being the only conduit between the talent (the production companies) and the money (the advertisers).
Okay, let's get off our "Content control is evil" mindset, and imagine a world where strict copyright controls apply. Someone can charge you money, and send you via broadband a TV program you can only watch *once*. Why do you need anyone between you and the creators of the show taking a cut? Where does the existing (incredibly inefficient) business model fit?
These poor bastards are doomed, they just don't know it. With shows amounting to only 44 minutes of a TV hour (including credits) when it isn't worse (taking 4 hours to play a one hour football game), they are killing the geese that lays the golden eggs. Even if they win, they lose. Strict content controls could be the worst thing to ever happen to them.
--Dave
Every now and then someone says something so outrageous that it demands the response, "Are you on crack!?" The American entertainmenet business must be shooting for a monopoly on this question.
-- Will program for bandwidth
So (like Napster in the audio sphere) there is this incredible new video technology that makes the viewing experience fresh and convenient for people and results in more time spent in front of the TV, and the content providers want to crush it. They are squandering their opportunity to drive it to new places. This may be a good thing because I'm not sure I want to go where them that make this kinda decision would drive it.
Reminds me of Gillette and the Track3. They understood that there was a technology potential out there that would yield a much better consumer experience - a smoother shave and a longer lasting blade - and they made the smart choice to develop it themselves (at a cost of hundreds of millions), knowing it would cannibalize the market they already owned. They knew that it was inevitable and they better do something with it or the opportunity would be lost. They could have said "we own this already, it's cheaper to beat back the challengers than to develop this right now". So they move forward and everyone wins - they remain in control, consumers get a cheaper and better product.
Beat back the challengers, stifle technology, limit choice, hide behind copy protection - everyone loses.
As much as we all malign advertising, it does on rare occasions enlighten us about things worth spending our time and money on, and even entertains in its own right. The problem is, most of the time it's trying to sell us on a slew of competing-but-otherwise-identical products, or just plain crap, and it's frequently irritating. The bigger problem is, people listen to the advertising and waste their time and money on a lot of unnecessary and crappy products, which is why they keep making them. The biggest problem is that our consumerist economy depends on us buying all this crap, to a certain large degree. How much of what you buy do you really use and really need? Not a whole lot really. It's wasteful, but it keeps the economy moving and people busy and employed, creating a rich society in which even the poorest can afford the essentials. The only way to reduce that waste is to create a more economically equal and stable society.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
It's sad that the networks don't realize the power of the PVR, it is right under their nose. Do you think the communication between your PVR and Tivo or ReplayTV is only 1 way? After the Superbowl, Tivo mined the data they received from their subscribers to discover that the Britney Spears commercial was the most re-watch commercial from the Superbowl.
Starting to get the picture? The PVR and thus ReplayTV and Tivo know what you watch, when you watch it, whether you skip commercials, what commercials you do in fact watch, etc., etc., etc. How is that information not a boon to advertisers?
If the networks and advertisers would pull their heads out of their hottubs, they'd realize that there is a huge potential for targetting ads. They could partner with the PVR companies (or buy them outright) and build an ad system that is based on actual viewer data. Instead of having to sit through 30% worth of commercials per network show, you could watch your favorite half-hour show along with 1 ad that is targeted specifically to you. I'd wager most people would actually watch this commercial, too, if only to see what the advertisers think they want!
I realize it isn't an easy or overnight process, but it seems to me to be a worthwhile endeavour, especially considering the pitiful ROI of today's ad-blast paradigm.
My $0.02.
-Scott
(Yes, I have read "Next" by Michael Lewis)
Why would an advertiser spend huge sums to place an ad during the 20h00 run of a prime time show if people with PVRs are just as likely to watch an off-hours run of the same show? For example, UPN runs "Enterprise" as a prime time slot on Wednesday, and in a non-prime slot Sunday night. If an advertiser knows that people are just as likely to watch the Sunday transmission as the Wednesday, why would they pay the premium fees for the Wednesday prime time run?
PVRs also mean a lot of the "filler" shows that run before and after their big hits don't get any audience, because they aren't scheduled in the PVRs. Suddenly their advertising fees are tied to the popularity of a show, not the time slot, and that means they have to invest a lot more effort into producing something people want to see for it's own sake.
Given the quantity of drek on the airwaves, it's no wonder they're running scared. How dare the audience demand quality shows!
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
It's not the job of the courts to protect your revenue from other business. This is like Hershey suing Mars because their damned M&M's are taking away from the sale of Hershey bars!
SIG: HUP
There are plenty of companies making commercial advance VCR's these days. You don't have to even lift a finger when watching a show.. commercial comes on, it automatically starts whirring along in fast-forward until the show comes back on.. VERY effective I might add.
So the question becomes, what else are they trying to stop.. the fact that people are going to be able to freely pirate shows on their new boxes? Hmmm..
Anybody know what the networks originally thought of the remote control? You know, the device that let's a viewer watch a different channel other than commercials without getting up?
Definately!
PS I tried to register a new account, 'Ken Pompadour'* but I never got the email. I guess Slashcode thinks I"m a troll ;-(
Ken Pompadour of Buy-Co fame. Spot that reference hehe
Don't forget that as television viewing mushroomed in the 50's and 60's, movie studios clamored that the new technology would destroy their business. It's interesting to see who owns what now...
-h-
We must get more offshore manufactures like china etc. to build more dodgy devices - DVD players that strip macrovision, let you fast-forward anywere. PVRs that don't give you _any_ limits, and allow you to tinker with them. Not to mention pre modded games consoles. These countries are our only chance, and they could make an absolute killing if they mass produced these devices and sold them cheap to us.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
I havent watched TV since I have had broadband internet access and have been able to download any show anyway
I and a group of touring poets were actually escorted from the premises of The Block at Orange (a mall in Orange, CA) for taking a group photo after spending our collective money in multiple businesses.
We didn't believe them at first, but the guards (they actually felt the need to send four guards to stop us) carry around a little card of ``rules''. It lists photography as a no-no right next to public defecation. I basically chalked it up to some moronic SoCal entertainment industry bullshit.
People in the entertainment industry just don't think like normal people. They'll use any angle they can find no matter how sleazy. If they can't figure out a way to exploit it, they'll keep it proprietary anyway just in case they find one someday.
Courtesy of the New York Times:
'The growing and dangerous intrusion of this new technology,' Jack Valenti said, threatens an entire industry's 'economic vitality and future security.'
Mr. Valenti, the president of the Motion Picture Association of America, was testifying before the House Judiciary Committee, and he was ready for a rhetorical rumble. The new technology, he said, 'is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman alone.'
It was 1982, and he was talking about videocassette recorders.
And they're still as paranoid and as utterly wrong now as they were 20 years ago.
HH
Consumers blame the corps. The corps blame the recorders. The recorders blame the advertisers. It goes around and around and around. I think things would be just a bit simpler if everybody involved accepted one simple truth:
NOBODY LIKES ADVERTISEMENTS!
It doesn't matter whether they put the ads in between scenes in the show or the use glaringly obvious product placement or anything of the sort. Time and time again the consumers have said "We don't like advertising." Hell, 99% of the advertising industry is trying to find new ways of advertising that the consumer literally cannot avoid, because even they know...
NOBODY LIKES AdVERTISEMENTS!
Do you think the anti-spam group would be so vocal if the content of these bulk e-mails wasn't advertising? Would various groups be unhappy with the way they're portrayed in commercials if their portrayals weren't used in order to sell something?
Now I admit that there's always a time and a place to inform potential customers about a product. But we have systems that allow business to do this that nobody minds. The phone book. Signs near the point-of-sale (soda fountains with "Coca-Cola" written on them). Hell, even QVC can be considered in this light.
If you're going to insist on putting advertising into a medium where the consumer does not want to see it, they will always find a way to avoid it, even if it means simply not paying attention to them. And frankly I don't understand how such advertisers are able to say that they earn their customers a profit with this.
If the broadcast networks insist on using intrusive advertising like this as their only means of income, then they deserve exactly what they get when, lo and behold, people avoid those advertisements. Hell, I wonder how many network execs own a PVR, because (lest we forget)...
NOBODY LIKES ADVERTISEMENTS!
The problem here is what is the new business model going to be? Soem assumptions:
- People won't pay for shows. I don't mind paying a little extra for HBO, but I don't think I could swallow paying $10 / month for each channel that I would like to watch.
- Advertisements become less affective as less people watch them, and hence don't pay networks as well
- Networks expirment with new formats... Possibilities Include:
- No commercial breaks. Instead, advertisers will pay for their products to appear in the show. Is this an improvement??
- Smaller, more annoying commercial breaks. Instead of 2 minutes breaks, there will be 5-30 second breaks, too fast to make it even worth it to fast forward. These would occur extremely frequently to compensate for the fact that they don't air for very long.
- Open Source Philosophy... let anyone watch it whenever... who cares. Regardless of how people on this board think, this isn't goign to work.
- Interactive Programming... programming that adds value by watching it live, rather than time shifted. Possibly by allowing the users to vote to see a different ending etc?? But its not going to happen because noone wants to use the internet and watch tv at the same time. Cue Microsofts upcoming HomewreckerStation.
- Sue the pants off anyone who threatens the current model.
Like it or not, the industry is going to change, and PVRs are not necessarily going to make it better. It may be nice for you and I, but eventually the networks are going to come back (and why not... we really are getting something for nothing from them) and pull something...So instead of bitching and complaining, why don't we try to come up with a better, less irritating, but still financially rewarding business model that would allow them to produce the content that we enjoy, without the advertisements that we despise.
Thoughts?
Captain_Frisk
When the RIAA got rid of Napster, they made a network like Gnutella into a viable alternative.
/. crowd hasn't rallied behind projects like OpenPVR.
So, just like happened with P2P, when they succeed (they most likely will) these companies will simply have created a market where the "target" is no longer so easy to hit. The most likely project to take up the slack is OpenPVR.
I have actually been surprised that, given the open source nature of Linux and the definate closed source mindset with regards to the filesystem/etc of the TiVo that the
"I'd like a book from Gibson, please." [click] "YOU'RE UNDER ARREST, SONNY!"
I have no karma and I must post.
total bullshit.
You mentioned that PVR's change the data as well as the timeshifting factor, but this is not the case. VHS can ALSO let you skip commercials just by pressing the stop button during the recording. I do think I remember seeing some special VHS recorders in the past (at high prices mind you) that would actively monitor the content and stop the recording when the content changed, but I don't remember if that is my imagination or if those devices were successful.
It just seems like this is an easy way for the TV companies to try to maintain stiff control over better devices that make TV better. Recording without commercials is a major time saving device. If you watch an hour of TV each night, this can save up to 15 minutes of your time.
"SOMEBODY has to pay for your content... if it's not the advertisers, it's gonna be you, directly out of your pocket. What's the worst of these two evils?"
Somebody has to pay? Fine. I'll pay. As an electronics engineer, I have a fair idea of just how little it costs to get the signal to my house. Any costs they have probably have to do with the thousands of hours of drivel they need to produce and cut to pad their adverts.
Why should I pay tens of dollars per month for lots of cut re-runs AND have to watch adverts? I _hate_ adverts. When I want to watch TV, I want to watch a particular program. I usually end up doing something else cos I couldnt be bothered to watch something that had 5 minutes cut out of it, along with almost 20 minutes of added crap that I mute and ignore.
The fact is that adverts do NOT give people something they want. The networks are basically there to produce shows for the advertisers. This marginalises you the viewer.
If the viewers pay for their TV, and only have a quarter of the channels, but they're actually worth watching, then the viewer wins.
Ok, so the networks might have less money. I certainly don't care. I'd have a service worth paying for. Unlike the current crap. The broadcaster wouldnt be treating me as a slave and an enemy either, because I WOULD BE THE ONE PAYING, not some dingbat who wants to sell me a worthless piece of junk.
FYI, I have happily moved from AT&T Digital cable with all the bells and whistles to no TV at all. I don't seem to be missing that much. I'll accept adverts on a free channel (because I won't watch it), but that's it.
I know that it is possible to produce good, cheap subscriber-only programming without adverts, because I used to have it. I can't get it here in the USA though.
---
....and it's now law. We have no idea who these studios might have in their back pocket..or how much bribe money they've already thrown about. The movie studios are a cartel..and their ability to BUY laws and judges is already well known. I know...many here will say that even is judge X is paid off and rules against TIVO then the appeals court will overturn them...BUT consider this... TIVO isn't Sony...Most companies aren't Sony, nor do they have even 1/10th the resources of Sony. It takes time and money..LOTS of money to win an appeal like the Betamax one..and I'll bet that a company the size of TIVO would be long broke, dead and buried before Sony even broke into a fiscal sweat. TIME is on these studios' side..this is why they keep filing all these (obviously frivolous) lawsuits. They know they can't win..but by suing they can delay...giving them the opportunity to get into the business themselves. Look at the RIAA and Napster. Napster, like TIVO didn't infringe on copyright...it's the USERS who infringed. Patel's decision is like finding Smith and Wesson guilty of murder because someone got killed with one of the guns they manufactured. Yet..(clueless) Judge Patel found against Napster. Hmmmm..I wonder if she ever has to pay for another CD? Anyone willing to give me odds on the size of her swiss bank account?
Do you happen to know what TV tuner cards are known to work in Linux, or where a list of such can be found? I've been thinking about building myself a PVR-type system lately, but TV tuner cards cost a bit, and I sure don't want to make a $100+ mistake buying a card that I end up not being able to use.
"There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such a profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statute or common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back." - Robert A. Heinlein, "Life Line"
At the risk of being controversial, what about the compensation that was being considered for the victims of the World Trade Center? At one point, if I recall correctly, the compensation plan was in proportion to the amount of money the victim made per year, or would potentially make during his/her lifetime.
Many of the families were saying, "Look at us now, our lives will be so much harder now that he/she can't provide for us."
So my question to them is this: why should the government pay for them to maintain their level of lifestyle? When circumstances change for other, normal people, they have to deal with it. What made the WTC victims families "special"? It can be taken to extremes of course. Look at the wife of Mr. Kerkorian, who recently sued him for child support to the tune of $400,000 per month! Her justification was that "to maintain the lifestyle" she was used to, they would need that amount. It went mostly into travel budgets, party funds, pet maintainance!
You would think the republicans, so embracing of self-reliance and laissez-faire, would support leaving businesses to live or die on their own.... But they only seem to be content with letting them live on their own. When it comes to businesses failing, the government can't get enough of its hands dirty... viz Enron...
The vast majority of folks do not have Tivos or if they do, they only have one. Yes, if they do then they can do these things on the one that they have in the "tv room". But really, how much of a percentage of total viewing time will be absorbed by these. Very little I would think. The TV in the kitchen that you will watch over your morning coffee, etc. etc. will not be connected to a PVR and you will have to endure the commercials. Overall, the studios are doing the usual thing of making a large fuss and expense about something that has little or no real impact.
Integrating ads isn't the only way to make money. Better advertising sometimes works, too. Make ads into stories. Make them funny and entertaining. Other countries do this, and enjoy a much higher viewer enjoyment of ads. I doubt this would seriously increase ad costs... but it might require a different sort of advertising industry. American TV advertising has been made sluggish by American's addiction to TV and our willingness to sit through anything in order to get to the next plot installment.
SOMEBODY has to pay for your content... if it's not the advertisers, it's gonna be you, directly out of your pocket. What's the worst of these two evils?
I might be willing to pay not to watch ads, but it depends how much it'd cost. I'm curious how much an average viewer would have to pay in order to compensate the networks for the ability to skip their share of the advertising.
Big Media is looking at this all wrong and they really stand to gain the most if they could stop preaching the mantra of the traditional TV format. I think as /. commentary proves there are a million ways to skin this cat. You could sell on a per season/per show basis, you could provide promotional tie-ins, shorten commercial breaks, pay-per-view, etc. But these all smack of TV v2.0. Not really a TV rethink.
I actually think that the future of television could be a producer-delivery-storage system. Television studios produce shows, a delivery network delivers those shows to a PVR and the user gets them in their INBOX every week like a magazine. Essentially like a magazine. The money could be made by subscription, and a subscription ensures access to back issues, special commentary, a nice fanzine, no commercials, guarantee of quality and on-time delivery, special subscriber only shows. You know, perks for being a subscriber.
I see the major stumbling blocks, other than adoption, as the corporate need to not standardize the format and make stupid alliances with one company and not the other. It should be possible for any PVR to play in this arena. Also a central location to manage your accounts and collection would be cool to. Then they could move to making sure their shows would play on 3G devices.
People will no longer beholden to the dross that any single station presents. Content will solely be profitable if it is worthwhile content.
Ideas contained herein are released under a GPL license.
How soon can we expect signing EULAs for cable service that commits us to watching the commercials in return for the 'agreed upon entertainment'?
I don't watch sitcoms, so I won't argue there. I do watch the latest Trek, though it's by no means my favorite show; same with X-files.
What I do find to be well-written and worth watching include: Farscape (probably the most original and best written Sci Fi in a long time), CSI (remember when CBS used to be a network?), Futurama (like the Simpsons, only fresher), BBC World News (on BBC America), The Avengers (from the 60's; it's on the Mystery Channel), and Dark Angel. Everyone tells me I should be watching Buffy; I should start picking it up the next time they start it over on syndication.
If you ever find yourself sitting down to watch TV and channel surfing, then that's when, if you had a PVR, you would be watching something you were interested in watching, instead.
Wow..what next...people getting pissed at trespassers?
"The dilemma is, the technology is turning the business model upside down. But that doesn't mean it's copyright infringement."
Well said.
We have been trying to kill it, but we shouldn't.
Sure, there is better stuff on Betamax, rentals, the 'net and Cable. But we shouldn't be working at trying to destroy the three big networks. They are a first line of defense or offense if needed. It's free and most of the population can get close to a TV.
We should however try to disrupt their cash flow! Think about it, GE, Westinghouse and now Disney are the owners of the three networks. Two are defense contractors... and one has their founder frozen!
People are worried about CNN and FOX News.... they don't even know what is up
---
Get your Unix fortune now!
The law around these cases mostly derives from the famous Sony vs. Universal supreme court case, known as the "Betamax decision." It declared time-shifting a fair use, and that recorders which had a substantial non-infringing use (such as so noted time shifting) were legal.
But that is all it said. Most notably, the court ruled that based on the time of the suit, studies showed that few people were fast forwarding over commercials when they time-shifted, because it was a pain to do. (Back then all you could do was go into FF with big mechanical buttons) and try to aim for the end of commercial. There was no on-screen scan, no commercial skip, no 30 second advance button.
The court used this to conclude that the time-shifters weren't taking money from the studios pockets, in fact they were giving them more because more people could watch a show thanks to their betamax.
Unfortunately, this logic is all but gone. Everbody commercial skips now because it's easy, and on a PVR it's really, really easy, and so you always do it. I see 1 commercial out of 100, if that, thanks to my Tivo. The court, looking at that, could rule quite differently.
This wasn't all the ruling, however. One other important part was that because there were free programs on TV like PBS shows (today they would also talk about C-SPAN) that clearly vcrs should be legal for people who want to tape those and do whatever they want (including make libraries.)
But that doesn't bear on commercial elimination, just on the recoder's right to exist as a linear recorder.
The studios will argue that the 1982 Betamax court did not know about 2002 technology, and would not have come to the same conclusion about how today's recorders are not hurting the commercial prospects of studios.
It was a 5-4 decision, and the chief justice was on the minority side, by the way.
It's important as well to understand what the time-shifting ruling meant.
Copying a tv show off the air is copying in the sense that copyright law defines it. It is an infringement under normal analysis of the studio's exclusive right to make such copies.
What the court did was say that "If the reason you're making the copy is just to watch it later -- including probably watching the commercials too -- then this copy is a fair use, not an infringement.
If, for example, you were taping off the air to sell the copies, that would not be a fair use, it would be a very clear infringement.
And if you tape off the air to build a library -- well, the court never said that was OK. People just took the time-shifting logic to imply this. We don't really know what the court felt about that.
So this is a complex issue with much left to resolve.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
The Sony Betamax case established the standard for testing the propriety of these types of devices. If the device is capable of a substantial non-infringing use, such as time-shifting a broadcast movie for later viewing at one's convenience, such as, a VCR and a PTR, there is no contributory liability for copyright infringement.
A no-brainer case. It would be amusing to see Sony again as the defendant in a Supreme Court appeal, since the 9th Circuit seems hell-bent on reversing the basic rules in this arena.
..."it is illegal to let consumers watch what they want to watch". That's practically what they're saying.
So if I type James Bond or X-Files in Amazon, doesn't that give me every available in perfect digital quality right at my fingertips??
The money being exchanged to purchase these almost seems to balance out with me based on the price of my monthly Tivo subscription over several years vs. Amazon's item cost.
We best be careful or these magic book collections called encyclopedias will give us access to every bit of standardized history at our fingertips as well.
-Barkeep, a draft of your most hazardous brew, for the world is slowly stepping into focus, and I don't like what I see.
Here's another angle on it.
Ad revenue for many media comes from statistics gathered on who reads what and what their retention of the ad is. These statistics are gathered through sampling.
Ads are developed and their success is measured by sampling.
All of the above uses relatively small sample sizes and can be extremely inaccruate. The media developers and purveyers all chargeon what they claim is the response to the ad.
Now throw in a PVR which can report back exact statistics on what commercials you watched. All of a sudden the data that the networks base their charges on is a lot more accurate. Maybe they just don't want to be caught selling something that doesn't really work any way.
The wierd part is that today is Feb 11th - the day that FOX converted SpeedVision into a 24 hour NASCAR commercial.
.com domain name.
Go ahead...
Turn it on if you have it... watch in astonishment. In a nutshell, Speedvision was a central repository of all forms of motorsport. People were learning that there were *alternative* forms of racing such as rally and formula1. Most of the shows in question were rebroadcast with permission from foreign affiliates - none of which had anything to do with FOX and their ASSCAR programming.
So what is the solution for FOX? Take over the channel and run it into the ground. In a year, you'll never remember that SpeedVision ever existed. Why did they have to change the name? Because it was so integral part of the scene (even a racing series was named SpeedVision Cup). Plus someone else already owns the speedchannel (FOX's new name)
In the end, the big guys one. Fuck FOX and ASSCAR. I'm going to start an anti-NASCAR mailing list and hopefully do the best to keep companies from advertising on the network. Actually, if you'd been watching speedvision recently, you would have noticed that they had already lost most of their advertising which caused them to resort to broadcasting old "vintage" commercials from the 50s, 60s and 70s.
Check out petitiononline.com/svsn - over 60k signatures and not a word from FOX.
Sigh...
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
This is the first I'd heard about this feature, I searched with Google to find details and the description I found goes like this:
Commercial Advance is how I spell "relief." Available on some RCA, ProScan and GE VCR models
of the past few years, it almost completely frees us from the clutches of the Eveready Bunny and Mr. Whipple. It works by poring over your freshly-made recording, seeking out and marking each commercial break. Then, when you play back the tape, it finds these markings and fast forwards through the commercials, turning a four minute advertising assault into about thirty seconds or so of fast-scanning bliss.
this is without a doubt an improvement but why record the commercials at all and use up the extra tape if it's technically possible to not record (or pause recording) during the commercials. Again I think that this is just a sop to the networks and people who make money off of advertising, though I agree without advertising there wouldn't be any network programming.
Every network's "branding" has increased in size each year- at first, a few years ago, it was a small, transparent logo that was mostly there to watermark the source of the show, appearing occasionally. Then, it became a persistent, color image. Now, many networks (TNN is the best example) put a big old splash graphic along the lower part of the screen, which is simply inches away from being a banner.
Question: Would you accept the banner ad as a replacement for commercials, e.g. the show runs uninterrupted? It seems a tempting replacement.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Now when I'm surfing the net, I turn off Flash (for saving CPU time mainly) and graphics from other sites than the one I'm viewing. Seems that such things will be banned since I see a lot less ads.
Then maybe someone will sue the writer of Galeon or other browsers that let me do that. Or worse, I won't have any open-source browsers any more since giving me the source means that I can modify it just by a little bit (if the program is well structured) and filter out most ads.
They should start relying more on infomercials for their revenue. Imagine potential customers getting a good view of the said product before buying it. Maybe a review of the product against its competitors. These channels would be used just like using the internet, to find reviews of certain products i'm interested in buying. How about offering a 1-800-number to buy the product. Saves me more time than entering credit info on the net. Plus i get the added bonus of talking to someone on the phone if i have any other questions about the product being sold.
How about a channel that sells or reviews computer hardware, network hardware, software etc....
SONNY: How do you turn on this here teevee?
RIKER: Teevee?
SONNY: Yeah, boob-tube...
DATA(to Riker)Oh -- I think he means television, sir.
DATA(to Sonny)That particular form of entertainment did not last much beyond the year Two Thousand Forty.
Star Trek: The Next Generation - "The Neutral Zone"
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
movable banner ads.
I would like to point out that Showtime and HBO are producing some really good TV Shows. They don't run ads. There isn't any blatent product placement. You don't even have those annoying ghost-logos because people have to pay for the channel to see it. Last time I checked you could get the complete package of channels for under $30 a month and that is about a total of 15 movie channels, too.
If they can provide all that content for around $2 a channel then I for one will welcome the death of the commercial break. Considering that there are less than 10 channels of TV that I find worth watching getting them commercial free for a small premium over what I'm already paying for cable would be great.
I really doubt that PVRs will really manage to kill the commercial break though. As I recall it VCRs were going to do this as well. Everyone has a VCR everyone can pre-record programs and fast forward through commercials, but people only bother to do this for programs they don't want to miss.
PVRs make commercial skipping easier sure, they also make recording shows easier. And with time the cost of the hardware will come down, maybe the PS3 will come with PVR capabilities. I mean It's kinda surprizing that the X-box can't do PVR considering the processor speed and the Nvidia GPU making mpeg-2 streams should be a snap. It even comes with a HD.
Even if PRVs became as pervasive as VCRs most households would only have one, that means the primary viewer would get the majority of the benefit of the PVR while secondary members would sometimes get commercial skipping but if a show was in conflict with another family member they'd be stuck watching it commercials and all on the second TV.
Maybe in 30 years when every household has 4 PVRs the commercial sponsored TV show will die, but it certaintly won't kill quality programming as the broadcast networks have already managed to do that.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
The casino's rent-a-cops will throw you out if you start taking pictures on the casino floor. Some times they will bar you from entering if you're not a (paying) guest and have a camera around your neck.
Hardware:
Linux box
Video/sound out
TV card
Satellite card
Or, one or more video/audio in to use with TV tuner and sat. receiver
IR out to control TV tuner/sat receiver
IR in to control the FreeVo from your couch
Software:
Nifty program selection GUI
Video stream storage
IR controlable playback tool
External tuner control
Service:
A shared DB where anyone can insert program info
Humans:
Charismatic PL
Loads of volunteers
Because the alternative is a lot worse. As long as there is a perception that you should be using a PVR to record movies there is less of a perception that you should be using a general purpose device. It so happens that general purpose device may also let you burn IP onto removable media while the PVR gives producers a certain level of control over what consumers can do with that IP.
Major League Baseball is already doing this: They've had advertisements super-imposed on the wall beside the batter on national broadcasts for the last two seasons.
When I first heard about it, it sounded pretty irritating. But then I was watching a Fox Saturday game of the week first season they had it, and didn't even notice it was there until the fourth inning. If it's done tastefully, and you're totally immersed in the content, it won't be so bad.
The key that keeps it from being distracting to the game is that the ads don't change when they're on the screen. So if you're watching a guy bat, you'll never be waiting for the pitch, then suddenly get distracted by the super-imposed ad changing from Schick to Pepsi, for example.
Who did what now?
The worst of the two evils? Why I'd like to pay for my content without ads please!
Wait a minute - *I am already paying for my content!*
Before moving to the US a few years back I was looking forward to having cable and so-many-channels. Imagine how pissed off I was when I discovered that they had adversiting! - what the hell am I paying for then!
To make matters worse, much of the programming seems to be focued on sensationalism etc. just trying to hold my attention between the ads!
i.e. most programming is just ad filler!!!
(e.g. why doesn't discovery have many actualy documentaries, instead of all these bullshit shows about sharks, fires, floods, earthquakes, snakes, voilent crime, etc. etc. that really tell me nothing)
/..sig file not found - permission denied.
I completely agree that the current business model for broadcasters is in danger of obsolescence from PVRs, but what your original article stated, and the the point I contended, was the right to free television. Still, there is a point in your latest response that I'd like to address.
> 3. Also, because the airwaves are public property, the networks can't just start encrypting those publicly owned airwaves. It's like a private company fencing off a public park and charging admission to get in.
Not exactly. It's perfectly legal to encrypt the data stream and then send it over a public frequency (HBO and cell networks do this all the time) as long as your FCC license allows it. At this point, regular television channels can't get such permission, but if a majority of them can begin to demonstrate significant financial hardship from their business model dying, they'll start getting permission to encrypt (or something else). Before you complain about this, you did say that the onus is on them to revise their business model, and switching network TV to pay-per-view certainly is a revision of the model, although not one I'd really like to see.
Virg
I thoroughly agree with you. That said, and switching on func(devil's_advocate), the networks are concerned for these reasons:
1.) PVRs make functionally perfect copies for cheap (I know they don't perfectly copy the incoming signal, but once captured subsequent copies can be replicated identically).
2.) It's much easier to edit out the commercials from a digital file than an analog recording (remember, (devil's_advocate) mode...).
3.) Sending said now-edited files around the world via the Internet will demolish the aftermarket for reselling TV shows/movies thus recorded.
Again, I stress that I disagree on the fundamentals of this, but I did want to point out that their argument isn't deontological. That is, they're not trying to argue that it's a duty to watch the ads. I'm sure they'd love to make everyone feel it's their duty to watch the commercials like good little consumers, but even they know that it would be unsupportable to say that.
Virg
> No, actually at least half of the stations you get on cable are subscription based.
I'm not signed up for any premium channels. Some of the channels I get are cable-only (the Comedy Channel or Sci-Fi are good examples), but even those are not subscription based. Keeping in mind that I was only using the $50.00 example because the parent did, I am literally only paying my $15.00 a month for delivery, not premium programming. I know I'm a little unusual in this, but since the original poster didn't allow exceptions I felt comfortable shooting back.
Virg
Get ready for heavy product placements, entermercials (like infomercials, but funnier), free 'TIVO-like' services that insist that the commercials be run without fastforwarding and as part of the show (i.e. a show will be a single unit of data according to the unit), etc.
It's time for another paradigm shift... no amount of litigation will change that!
But doesn't this kind of device actually improve delivery of this kind of target audience to the advertisers?
I mean really... Cmon. This is the reality of any high profit industry. They (the television gurus) send an army of lawyers after anyone that would disrupt their outrageously high profit margins. Its the same with porn, movies, and cigarettes.
> Wrong. Where do you think that $50.00 goes? Your local cable company has to pay cable channels for the use of their programming.
Actually, I only pay $15.00 a month, and I don't get any premium channels, and most importantly, we were discussing commercial TV, not pay-for-access channels. Lastly, although it's a minor point of semantics, the local cable company pays for the right to broadcast, not for use of the programming. The end user pays for the use.
Virg
SOMEBODY has to pay for your content... if it's not the advertisers, it's gonna be you, directly out of your pocket. What's the worst of these two evils?
... which is why, in the UK, we have TV licensing.
For about £100 per year you get 10 digital channels and 5 radio stations *with no adverts*.
How much do you pay for your TV programs with adverts every 2 minutes?
and this is much easier if you have them in your TiVo or VHS box. Example: the Dead or Alive 3 / Xbox blurb with catfight action so graphic that the dweebs in the commercial are reduced to staring and drooling, with serious effort required to articulate intellectual concepts such as: "Heh. She kicks _high_". There're some fairly rad shots if you run through it in slo-mo. Of course, I'm postponing my purchase of an Xbox until hacks get a Linux Kernel running on it, but it's nice to know that there are interesting games available for it's native mode.
Uh, is it OK to time-shift a commercial? Or are they copyrighted, too?
Also, I write a bit of fanfic now and then and it's nice to have an extensive collection of Star Trek tapes for reference material. This would be unnecessary if Viacom/Paramount would see fit to post enough detail on startrek.com to make it a useful reference, but they don't, and they don't allow others to, either, so I find myself resorting to my tapes to look up some bit of dialog or other trivia.
I'm sure there are others who do this. A _lot_ of you appear to be real afficionados of stuff like Buffy, B5 & Dr.Who, and it's not as if we're going to market these tapes (with or without commercials) on eBay.
Heck, if you even want to read the credits at the end of a show anymore you have to capture them and play them back, with plenty of pause. Some of us actually _care_ who the episode author and the guest stars are!
PVRs allow you to delete the commercials? Kewl. It's not as if we haven't seen them ALL.
Exceeding the recommended torque is not recommended.
If the suits were really interseted in getting accurate information about peoples' viewing tastes and habits (for marketing purposes), then they would see PVRs as the perfect replacement for the Neilsen rating system. PVRs are a whole lot more widely deployed than Neilsen boxes, which means that they're positioned to get much better statistics than Neilsen could ever hope to get. But the suits aren't intersted in adapting to a newly emerging market.
Oh and you might stop the PVR like they stopped Napster. But I hardly think they can ban having TV-in/TV-out on a general purpose computer...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
There is a 'middle way' I've heard about that seems an acceptable compromise. My source works in the set top software industry, but for legal reasons... etc
/.'rs feel about the idea of compromise (If such a word has any meaning on /.!)
The ideal solution for the networks is to have the software force you to watch the ads to protect thier revenue, but viewers will rightly hate this.
The ideal solution for the viewer is to have no ads at all wasting drive space and time, networks will hate this and fight it - its also actually bad for the viewer because the ads subsidise the broadcasts (yes I know they make profit from the ads too but if a significant proportion of digital set top boxes 'block' ads then they'll lose a significant revenue stream and they'll have to replace this from somewhere)
So the middle ground idea is this:
People are already used to timeshifting with a VCR and then fast forwarding the ads. The advertisers know this, but its not too bad as you still _see_ some of the ad, and if they have a freeze shot at the end research shows you'll still probably recall it.
So have 2 copies of the ads broadcast in the data stream - the full 30 second clip that is seen in 'real time' and say a 5 second clip that is shown when timeshifting or fast forwarding. The ad companies can now specifically target a short ad. (BTW bear in mind that in digital broadcasting the ad break is probably going to evolve into a carousel of adverts broadcast together that your set top box then displays a selection based on your location and/or your viewing habits - you didn't think that the profile feature was just so it could suggest programs for your benefit did you? If done right there are minimal privacy issues as all the profile data should be on your set top box, not back on the networks servers - again another compromise we as viewers need to reach)
Its not exactlly what both sides want, but I suspect that both sides will be able to accept it. The networks can still sell a certain amount of predictable advertising, and the viewer gets only a short burst of ads but this will hopefully stop the channel going pay-per-view/subscription.
In the end digital broadcasting can offer more to the netwroks by being able to better traget adverts, making them more effective and more revenue, whilst in home technology like PVR's can remove this. To move forward both the networks and the viewers need to evolve to a point where a balance is struck. In the end commercial broadcasting needs advertising to survive, what we as viewers need to decide is what is the least intrusive way for us to allow this to happen so that we get to see the shows we want at a reasonable cost.
We've fought a reasonably good battle in the UK to move from metered to unmetered net connections. It would be ironic if the technology forced TV broadcasts into a metered subscription system as I'm sure that would in the end cost the viewers more, and offer them lower quality programming.
The broadcast industry is lining up at one extreme to protect its buisness, if we as viewers and consumers line up at the other extreme then its going to be messy. If we can suggest a compromise then we are more likely to get an acceptable solution as our position will seem reasonable when compared to the broadcast undustry's extreme one.
The genie is out of the bottle, but unless both sides can compromise and keep it under control it could collapse the industry, be that the music industry / entertainment / broadcast / movies. Consumers and Industry have to accept that we need an environment were buisness can make money to survive and turn a profit (after all you wouldn't work for just enough money to keep you alive would you?) whilst not leaving the consumer feeling exploited.
PVR's / Napster etc all boils down to the same argument. A huge monopoly forcing technological solutions on us is bad and wont work, but the counterpoint of using technology to grab everything for free will destroy the very thing we want to get hold of.
The solution is a social one, not a technological one. The question is how we get there as both producers and consumers need to evolve thier understanding in a world where technological change is occuring rapidly.
Well, slightly more than 2cents worth, but I'd be interested in hearing what other
That being said, the argument really is that it's Just Too Easy. Just like it was with Napster. Music piracy is illegal, but that didn't stop anyone from 'sharing' music with napsters client software. Regardless how il/legal music sharing is, it's "just too easy", so it can't be stopped.
Let's be frank, it's just so easy to time shift a recording and then skip the commercials. Even when I'm watching "Live" tv, I pause it for 10 minutes to let it buffer up while I play video games or something, then go back to watching and fast forwarding commercials. To give everyone a fair shake, I will rewind to watch a commercial that caught my attention.
The entertainment industry should embrace the Tivolution now. If they don't, it really IS going to become napster for them too. Right now the distribution model is still pretty much the same (shows come on TV, we watch them, commercials too now and again). If they stop the PVR's from happening, video will end up just like music. P2P for video is already here... want to entrench it into the John Q. Internet-Luser: just make affordable PVR's impossible to own.
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
The program fades, and girls with little to no clothing come on - pass me the soap one says, reaching out and accidentily dropping her towel - woops says the other - here is the 'insert soap brand here'. thank you giggles the other.
...
I bet you would watch _that_ one
Perhaps you meant "cite"?
Actually, if you made the computation in a 2-dimensional matrix, the result would be that 1 != 0 I won't write that out, it's far more complicated than the famous 1=0 theory ;)
Don't click here. BT will enforce intellectual rights and sue for eac
... it smells like victory.
Does this mean Hollywood is against PVRs until AOLTimeWarnerMcDonaldsDisneyMegaCorp buys out Tivo? Then they will be in Washington bucking for a federal handout to make PVRs mandatory in everyone's home. You will be branded un-American, a Communist, or even a "terrorist" if you don't own one.
Shades of "Universal Broadband Access".