Time on "Pirates of Primetime"

binarydreams writes "Time has a pretty decent article on the capturing and trading of television shows on the Internet. The author gives a very good description of the capturing process, the people who enjoy the results, the future of PVR (focusing on the Replay 4000) and why the TV and movie industries are scared." This is just more of the TV industry coming to grips with what happened to the music industry. But it's important that the mainstream learns about it.

Comments

TV Shows being pirated

[arnoroefs2000]

To get an idea of the amount of TV shows being pirated, and the speed at which they get ripped take a look here.

Fair Use

[commonchaos]

For me at least there is much less of a grey line in this area, I dont have a TV, so I've had friends tape shows, and go and watch them later. I have traded tapes. People have had VCRs for ages, and there actually are people who can program them. The industry has known this for a long time. Most people have a small collection of movies taped off of cable.

I hope that they can learn from the mistakes that the music industry made.

my 0010 cents

Re:Big Pussy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Big Pussy was a character in the show.

~~~

Thank God!

[jdma]

This allows us (in Europe) to see some shows that we may not be able to see even if we have cable! Or seet it before (South Park, Futurama).

awful

[vukv]

awful article... things that "journalist" forgot to mention are important: replaytv allows you to send file to other users 15 times and users who received the file can not send it again to anyone.

That makes all the difference in upcoming lawsuit. I find it hard to believe Sonicblue people didnt stress that out to him.

Copyright Trouble Of The Week

[wiredog]

Here's Dvorak's latest...

As the owner of Planet Replay, my views.

[Tide]

I was interviewed for this article last week and I was sorely disappointed to read how sensationalistic is was towards sharing shows with the ReplayTV 4000 likening us to Napster. Napster traded what was known copyrighted material, bought by home users and illegally copied and sent to others. RTV on the other hand is basically a digital VCR, or timeshifting device. It is currently legal to timeshift, send to friends, and receive shows this way. No different than user a standard VCR and even slower depending on file size. The biggest complainers should be advertisers who pay big money to be on Friends. But really,I don't agree with that either. They take a chance that I will see there ad anyways. There is nothing preventing me with regular TV to just leave the room or turn off the TV when ads come on.

Check out my site Planet Replay for more information on Replay show sharing.

Re:As the owner of Planet Replay, my views.

[ryantate]

Napster traded what was known copyrighted material, bought by home users and illegally copied and sent to others.

First of all, the Napster trial is ongoing, so the legality or illegality of that network is still up in the air, as is the legality or illegality of the actions of its users. Judge Patel's rulings thus far have concerned the preliminary injunction that was, after much wrangling in the federal appeals court, finally put in place. She reached some initial conclusions that may or may not point to the final outcome of the trial, but the legality of the service is not established. Further, the company (last time I checked) offers as one of its key arguments the notion that sharing among users is protected by both the Audio Home Recording Act (1992?) as interpreted in the Diamond v MPAA (?) case and fair use doctrine of the overall copyright code. Someone please correct me if this legal stance has changed, I haven't followed the case closely since the injunction came down.

Second, Napster also used a time-shifting argument in fighting the preliminary injunction. It became clear in both the district and appeals courtrooms (I was there) that the judges found this a bit ridiculous, as the focus and technical structure of Napster was not oriented toward, say, sharing a file at home and downloading it at work, but rather distributing it to others.

Most importantly, is it reasonable to call the Replay 4000's sharing and especially timeshifting functions "no different than using a standard VCR?" I doubt even Sonicblue's own marketing department would agree to that bland assesment of their product, and I suspect that in an Amazon or epinions review you might disagree with yourself here. In terms of timeshifting, you have a device that is capable of skipping over commercials with a new degree of automation and of capturing a massive volume of shows and of doing so with, again, a new degree of automation.

As for sharing, it is quite different to be able to beam something to someone rather than to haul a tape to them physically. What's more, what you are beaming is much more easily placed onto a computer hard disk and shared at large, albeit by circumventing controls in the Replay unit. Either one of the traits taken by itself widely expands the circle of "friends" you are able to share with, and it is the line between friendly or scholarly sharing and mass distribution that is at the heart of the Napster case. The line is only a little bit more clear, IMHO, with Replay.

I am not agreeing or disagreeing with your legalargument, but you seem a bit quick to dismiss the paradigm-shifting capabilities of Replay, similarities (if only superficial) to Napster (and IIRC the article in question was talking not just about Replay but about how others use/abuse its files) and those who finance the production of free television shows (setting legal issues aside, I like the fact that while I'd have to pay ~$20 a month for Sopranos I get West Wing and 60 Minutes for free, and the chance society at large might watch just somewhat fewer commercials could harm the free programming model). I think it is possible to make a much stronger case for the machine if you attempt to grapple with these issues.

Cheers
R

URL

[tiltowait]

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/17/technology/circu its/17VIDE.html

You just have to know the address, then you can get in through the free registration method. Although Google follows the nytimes.com robots.txt, enough people link to articles that the search engine has records for the URLs.

Re:Big Pussy?

[rhinoman455]

Big Pussy is a character on The Sopranos :)

What half arsed journalism

[Commienst]

"The owners of Morpheus, Grokster and Kazaa, on the other hand, are expected to argue that since they don't use a Napster-like central server--even the indexing software is distributed among users--it is impossible for them to monitor the activities of the millions of people who use their programs."

Millions? Did they even check their facts.

Don't even get me started about Farscape

[huntdwumpus]

The last 4 eps. of season 3 have already aired in the UK, but they won't air on SciFi Channel until April. There's really no choice but to download...(or fly to Europe).

Re:A missed opportunity

[Nurlman]

Why not make it available for sale? Who says that shows need to be off-the-air for a couple of years before they're made available? Who says that only the most popular shows should be made available?

Syndicators, that's who. The real money in producing t.v. shows is getting enough episodes of a show ordered that you can then turn around and sell them as a syndication package.

Think about it-- the major networks really only supply prime-time programming-- 8p.m. to about midnight. Everything else that shows on network affiliates (and non-affiliate stations) is either locally generated programming or syndicated stuff. That's why you get The Simpsons or ST:TNG showing every day on a given channel-- because the channel bought the syndication rights for that package of shows. Syndications of popular shows can reap a bloody fortune in revenues for the production company-- in the hundreds of millions of dollars for a reasonably successful comedy. (Typically because an affiliate in every market will buy a syndication package for a successful show, rather than having the network pay for it once for first-run.)

Anyway, the reason shows aren't released to video shortly after they finish their first-run is because the money to be made in syndication is so staggering. If Paramount sold ST:TNG videos of the most recent season's episodes 6 months after the end of each season, they'd have a much harder time pitching the entire series in syndication to the local stations-- after all, the fans of the show (who translate to eyeballs watching the local station's advertising) already have permanent copies of the episodes that are being offered as a syndication package.

That's why you're only seeing Seasons 1 & 2 of The Simpsons on DVD now: because the syndication package that features those episodes doesn't command much of a price from local stations any more. Fox (or, more accurately, Gracie Films, the producer of the show) waits to release videos until it has gotten maximum value from syndication of those episodes because syndication offers a bigger revenue stream than video sales. For shows that don't (or won't) make it into syndication (typically, you need in the neighborhood of 100 episodes or about 5 seasons to make it attractive to an affiliate who will run 5-7 shows a week), a video release can occur much faster. (Witness South Park, which Comedy Central knows damn well won't run on a broadcast station because of its content. You can buy videos of SP now, because those sales aren't cannibalizing potential syndication revenue.) Of course, if a show wasn't popular enough to survive for 100 episodes, it's unlikely to have a big enough market to make a video release financially viable. There may be 10,000 people who loved the live-action Tick series, but even if all 10,000 people buy the DVD set, will that cover the cost of pressing and marketing the discs?