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Turner CEO: "PVR Users Are Thieves"
mrbrown1602 writes: "It was bound to happen - 2600.com is reporting that Turner Broadcasting CEO Jamie Kellner is calling PVR users thieves. When asked why personal video recorders are bad for the industry, Keller says 'Because of the ad skips.... It's theft. Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots. Otherwise you couldn't get the show on an ad-supported basis. Any time you skip a commercial or watch the button you're actually stealing the programming.' Since when have we made contracts with the broadcasters for watching their content? More of the 2600 article can be found here."
After a quick Google I found an example of such device, being the Hitachi VT-FX880E that has a feature called Commercial Advantage. I am not sure how effective it is but his a snippet taken from a review
If the FX880 were a computer Commercial Advantage would be described as its killer app. What it actually reflects is Hitachi ingeniously tackling the old problem of getting rid of the ads from programmes recorded from commercial TV stations. There have been attempts to do this almost from the dawn of the VCR but most have attempted to blank out the ads completely. What Commercial Advantage cleverly does is detect when an ad break starts, automatically kicks into fast forward and then drops back to normal speed when the programme resumes, all without you having to lift a finger.
It does this by detecting a signal that is sent at the beginning of each ad break which effectively returns a network to local programming so ads for that region can be shown. A signal at the end of the break marks network programming restarting and the end of the Commercial Advantage option. As with all good ideas it is deceptively simple but not without its faults. In our tests of the feature we found CA kicking in at the start of local TV promo spots (trailers, etc) that run before the advertisements themselves. Even so, it's a great idea and a genuinely useful one.
aus.music.scrapbook
Well, to get technical, this is how it works. Recording a program off the air is, the court agreed, covered by copyright. If you recorded tapes off the air and tried to sell 'em (normally a right you have under first sale doctrine) you would definitely get nailed, and the court would agree about it.
So what they said was that the reason you made the copy made a difference in whether you needed permission or not. They said, quite reasonably, that if the reason you made the copy was to watch it later, that was cool, and you don't need the permisison of the studio. Because this was ruled a fair use, it meant the VCR was not an illegal device, the way the studios wanted it to be. It has other uses, such as recording Mr. Rogers. Mr. Rogers, a big believer in sharing, came into the court and said he didn't mind if people taped his shows. Again, this meant to the court that the VCR must be legal.
That created a good standard that said that even though you could make infringing copies of movies with the VCR, it was still legal as a device because you could also do totally legal things with it. All good news.
The bad news comes when you read why they said it was OK to time-shift. Back in 1978, studies showed few people fast forwarded over commercials. No surprise, it was a pain to do it with a 1978 model VCR. Thus, the court said, people are just watching the shows at other times, and still seeing the commercials, so what are you studios complaining about? This box is getting you more viewers.
But if the court had decided that those viewers were skipping the commercials, they might have not ruled the same way. With newer tech, the story could have been different. The vote was only 5 to 4 -- just one judge changing his mind and the VCR would have been illegal, along with a lot of other tech.
And yes, leading the dissenters was our current chief justice.
Nobody knows how the modern court would rule. But you can't take out protection for automatic commercial skip from the older decision.
Of course, going to the bathroom during a live show doesn't have anything to do with copying, so it doesn't even come up. The law is all about copying, not about the commercials. Normally you can't copy at all, other than for the fair uses. The court said watching it later was a fair use. More recently, a lower court ruled that watching it on another device is a fair use too.
(This was a bit of an expansion of what fair use is, since most of the time it referred to republishing, not personal copying.)
The fight to protect technology will not be an easy one, unfortunately. This decision is more narrow than we might hope. However, the current court is a pretty good free speech court, and we have hope that they will approve free speech arguments.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
The interesting thing is, does it really matter if you watch the ads or not? Networks' ad revenue is based on how many people watch a show, which is based on Nielson ratings. It is NOT based on how many people buy something after they see an ad, because that is pretty hard to determine.
That statement is slightly incorrect. Networks advertising revenue is based not only on how many people watch a show, but also on the what advertisers are willing to pay to show ads to each viewer. For example, Anheuser-Busch will pay a lot more per viewer to have Budweiser ads shown during an ESPN hockey game than during Oprah Winfrey's show because the two target audiences are different. If technology makes it easier for viewers to skip advertisements, then it can be expected that the advertiser's perecieved value for TV spots will drop, assuming the audience size does not grow. This is a reasonable assumption to make since if even fewer people now than before are viewing an ad, then fewer new sales can be expected as a result of a given television ad campaign. Thus networks will experience a drop in revenue because of this.
On the other hand, calling the user of PVR's theives will not do these networks any good, and risks further alienating people from these outlets' programming. Technology changes: they need to deal with it, and I believe most will do so in the long run. IMO, the pay cable channels like HBO and Showtime have the right idea: produce top-notch, ad-free programming and air popular movies long before any other television outlet (beside PPV), and people will gladly pay $12-15 a month for your product. If a similar premium service came out that aired sports in a similar fashion at a similar price, then I would cancel all of my other basic cable channels in a heartbeat and be happy with over-the-air and two premium services for ~$30/month that I will watch on a nightly basis. Unfortunately, the rules of American sports make explicit allowances for TV timeouts and the like, so a premium ESPN doesn't seem possible for the near future.