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?

Comments

Good. Kill it

[chrisgon]

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.

Re:Explaining the bizzare "illegal" quote

[Tackhead]

"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 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," the lawsuit states.

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.

Here's the real reason they don't like PVRs.

[oGMo]

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.