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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?
Fox can easily prevent X-Files watchers from acquiring copies of the episodes. Just don't broadcast them.
The good thing is that in courts, the argument of "if they do this it will hurt our business" doesn't hold up, even for baseball and it's strange exemption from antitrust laws.
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.
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.
If the entertainment industry would just sell me copies of every X-Files or Babylon 5 episode on DVD, rather than making me wait 5 years after the end of the series...
If they'd offer me all the episodes at once, rather than 2 episodes per disc, with me having to "hope they keep producing 2-episode disks, once every month, for the next 8 years, so I can get the complete series rather than just having half the series until they stopped producing 'em"... then maybe I'd buy.
Until they offer me the product I want, I'll continue to get that product the only way I can. The fact that it's free-as-in-beer is only a bonus.
Anyone for South Park episodes? If quality doesn't matter, you can fit an entire season on a CD-R. (And if you want good quality, an entire season on a DVD-ROM.) Or you can go to the store and see a DVD with two episodes on it. 44 whole minutes of video. Whoop-de-fsck.
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
There is realistically no way for them to make money from these devices. (Unlike with the VCR).
The heck there's not! If I were running a big broadcasting company, I would cut a deal with Tivo/Replay to put my ads in their devices. There is a lot of ad-ready real estate in those devices' interfaces... pause screens, config screens, choose-your-recording screens... You could even have the ads be contextually relevant; if you pause the show during Friends, you see a still ad from a Friends sponsor.
There are ways to monetize these devices, but Newthink is scary, so the broadcasters are trying to crush the technology.
And if none of those ideas prove to work out, the damn broadcasters will have to find some other way of making money. Poor babies!
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
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)