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."

Comments

Ha Ha friggin Ha.

[Erik_Kahl]

This is silly. I pay my damned cable company ~50 for the right to watch whatever portion I want of what they send down the wire. I didn't agree to watch everything they offer.

Are they going to come and beat me now up if I flip the channel during a commercial. I almost always do.

This is silly.

I have been a thief for decades!

[aussersterne]

I don't look at ads anywhere -- on television, at the cinema, on shopping center walls... And yet I continue to keep my eyes open and see everything else!

I am stealing all of society! I will crush the world economy! It is my evil masterplan!

Bwahahaha! Ha-ha!

Re: I have been a thief for decades!

[Black Parrot]

> I am stealing all of society! I will crush the world economy! It is my evil masterplan!

I go further and add insult to injury, by getting up and making a peepee during commercials.

Take that! I pith on your profitability, Turner Broadcathting!

the future according to the broadcast companies

[Sarin]

Normally I just zap away during a commercial break.
If they get what they want then I can imagine a future with digital tv, when you zap away the commercial break too long, you will be banned from watching the end of the show.
There's going to be all kinds of irritating rules if we don't watch out.

Other Crimes

[jackal!]

Skiping commercials is theft? Then what about hitting mute? What about going to the bathroom? What about talking loudly to your loved ones during commercial? Gonna send us to jail for that?

Should we envision a dark future where you watch a show and then are QUIZZED on the ads you saw? If you pass you're good, if you fail you're fined? That's the only way I can see this form of theft ever really held in check.

When I buy something and take it home or have it delivered to my home, I can do whatever I want with it. If I buy something I can use it however I want. I can even throw it away if I want. Same should apply with my cable television. I paid for it, it was delivered. I didn't sign any contracts promising I'd watch any single second of it, and whatever I do with it is up to me -- the sale never stated otherwise.

And what about broadcast television? What are your signals doing tresspassing on my property? Okay, that one's a bit silly, there are federal regulations for airwaves, but it isn't much siller than calling skipping an ad theft.

Re:Other Crimes

[dunstan]

Reminds me of a campaign which ran in the newspapers here (GB) encouraging advertisers to buy newspaper advertising space. It pictured a couple enjoying married congress on the sofa with the TV on in the background and said "accorting to audience statistics these people are watching your advert - who's really being screwed?".

Of course Turner's real concern isn't whether people skip the adverts, it's whether he gets paid by the advertisers, in which case it's not a lot different to websites saying "please click on the banner ads so we get money from the advertisers".

Dunstan

BTW, is this the same Turner as runs TNT? I happened to be in the US for the 1990 World Cup, and remember that TNT repeatedly interrupted the live soccer to run adverts while play continued, and it was the same adverts over and over and over again. After that I vowed never to by "Tums" again. Worse, they ran trailers for their own World Cup coverage instead of cutting back to the game which was going on. Madness.

The future of TV and commercials

[btempleton]

The bad news is the Supreme Court betamax decision, if you read it in detail, may not protect automatic commercial skipping, though it would probably protect manual skipping like the 30 second button or 60x FF.

I've written up an essay of one possible result of the conflict between commercial TV, PVRs, commercial skip and DRM.

You can read about The future of TV in the essay.

Re:The future of TV and commercials

[btempleton]

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.

disgusting

[gvonk]

The only payment for a lot [of content] is the willingness of the viewer to watch the spot, the commercial. That's part of the contract between the network and the viewer. For anybody to step in between that content and encourage the viewer to disregard the payment in time that he's making--I think everybody should fight those people...or let the viewer have a subscription model where they pay for that, in which case the monies can be taken in and distributed back to cover the loss of the ad revenue.

This is wrong on so many levels. I can watch whatever the fuck I want to of the television programming you send into my house. If I want to watch only 3 minutes of CSPAN perday and nothing else, so be it. If I want to watch only the 5 or 6 interesting shows on the air, so be it. If I want to close my eyes and not watch the ads or find some other way to not watch them, too freakin bad for you! YOU were the one who decided that the volatile business model of selling advertising would bring you stable profits; you are the one taking the risk and putting together the programming together in the first place.
I don't owe you anything.

Re:disgusting

[dimator]

YOU were the one who decided that the volatile business model of selling advertising would bring you stable profits

Volatile? This is how television has worked for decades. This model is what pays the stars of the shows millions of dollars per episode. It's hardly volatile.

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.

So if a Nielson family PVR's a show, it will still show up in it's Nielson rating. Who cares if everyone *else* watches or doesnt watch the ads?

Re:disgusting

[kadehje]

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.

Re:disgusting

[Rogerborg]

• So if a Nielson family PVR's a show, it will still show up in it's Nielson rating

With a big old question mark over it regarding whether the ads were actually watched. Advertisers - who have to pretend to believe that advertising has an effect - will happily use any uncertainty to leverage pay deals.

There's an interesting advert airing in the UK at the moment, for the main satellite broadcaster. They're selling a tweaked PVR that also decodes two channels at once. The advert is about how subversive this is. Unspecified Men In Black are aghast that Joe Consumer is pausing live TV and watching one channel while recording another. What they don't say is that you can skip adverts. It's a very intruiging angle on it; the broadcasters are clearly uncomfortable with the idea. It doesn't feel right, even to them, and they backed away from pushing one of the big selling points, the ad skips.

Incidentally, in the UK, ratings are gathered minute-by-minute, so they know if we're channel hopping during the adverts. The ratings households also have their VCR recordings watermarked, so their viewings are registered when they play them back. I don't know if they can detect advert skips in a recording, or whether the watermarking works on PVR's. I do know that they're worried about digital content, as we went a week or so at the start of the year with no figures, when they screwed up the rollout of a new interim system to track figures, while they come up with a complete solution to registering all digital content play through the TV.

Now there's a thought. What's the difference between recording and playing back to my PVR, between me getting that same digital content from someone else, or downloading a copy from the 'net, or for that matter using my TV to play a sports game from my PC or console which has in game advertising?

I can see why this is keeping the advertising droids awake at night. If they want to continue pretending that advertising works, they'll need some pretty smart hardware - or some pretty harsh legislation. And it's that latter thought that worries me. If you thought the RIAA and MPAA were bad, wait until the advertising market wakes up and smells the digital coffee.

FINE!

[gnovos]

Then I'll just take my public airwaves back please... Oh, NOW who's the thief?

Does this mean..

[ShaunC]

..if I decide to watch the ads, I can quit paying money to watch cable?

I was under the impression that the money I pay to my cable company - Time Warner, which is a Turner enterprise in its own right - is passed along to the cable content providers in licensing fees. I thought that my cable subscription fee was divvied up and sent piece by piece to Showtime, E!, the Comedy channel, etc. I guess perhaps I've been wrong all these years, and Turner is giving the programming to my (Turner) cable company? That Turner isn't making a penny off the fees I pay to my cable company? Ignoring, of course, the obvious Turner-Time Warner relationship.

I really don't get it. I pay for cable programming, it has commercials. My local TV stations are free, they have commercials. Guess which channels on which I'm more likely to mute/skip commercials? Damn right - the channels I pay for.

Shaun

So wait if that is theft...

[rblancarte]

Will they pay me if I record their channel and JUST watch the comercials? It sounds like a sound arguement.

RonB

Ad Detecting VCRs

[galaga79]

What about those VCRs that have mechanisms for detecting and skipping ads? They must really instill fear in the likes of Jamie Kellner and co.

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.

Re:Ad Detecting VCRs

[Lumpy]

what it is attempting to detect are Cue tones.. and they happen from 5-3 seconds before the break is to start (depending on the network, the delay was for tape decks to get up to speed, now we use Pentium 133 machines inserting 24 Mpeg2 streams at once.... cool hardware) The problem with the VCR and why it is now a flop is that the new digital insertion equipment filters out the touchtones that are the Cue tones (Usually a *XXX to start with XXX being a number sequence and a #XXX to be a stop tone, they dont send those and are almost always ignored except for live events)

so this vcr would not work today. and digital cable channels dont use old-fashoned touch tone based Cue tones but a 3rd digital audio carrier sent on the sattelite feed that is fed directly to the ad insertion equipment and is never a part of the signal that leaves the cable TV headend.

The ONLY way you are going to detect and remove commercials is with a luminance level detector and a type of "AI" to watch a few of the shows and determine the approximation of the ad-break times and then work on assumptions. AD's are 30 and 60 seconds in length and breaks are from 2 to 4 minutes in length with Turner networks averaging 8 minutes or more. (UPN does 10 I swear!)

Fair use = STEALING

[HanzoSan]

Face it, its their way of trying to make you feel morally wrong for doing what you have a right to do.

You paid for access to the information, once it gets to you its YOURS to do whatever you want with it, or at least thats how it should be. information is NOT an object, its more like air, they want to charge you for air and then say you are a thief if you use the air in the wrong way, (example you find a way to use the air to create more air)

I love these morons...

[MrHat]

I'm sure they wouldn't mind producing this 'contract', then. What's that? I didn't sign a contract? Well, that's interesting. Perhaps they meant 'broken business model' and not 'contract'.

Additionally, maybe this fucktard Kellner can explain how I go about stealing something I've already paid for. I'd love to hear that one.

I swear to God, the year that we perfect a method to endlessly duplicate food will be the year in which half of the US population starves to death.

In the rare chance that Slashdot is still here when that happens, I'll post an 'I told you so' message. I'll be the one with a shotgun and a food duplicator, hiding in my basement, posting from the only Apple IIe that survived the circumvention crackdown of 2015. I'm saving this link. I expect a +5.

Somebody has to pay for it...

[Gordonjcp]

If you pay for cable or satellite TV, then only a small proportion of the money goes to the company that produces the programmes. Most of it is sucked up by administrivia.

Here in the UK, the "TV Licence" that so many USians seem to just not understand pays for something like 6 advert-free TV stations (two of which are on analogue UHF, all six only being carried on digital TV) and a couple of dozen advert-free radio stations. Now, there's a side effect to this - in heavily commercial radio and TV the programmes are just a vehicle for the adverts. In other words, any programming is just there to fill the 10 minutes between ad breaks. Remove the need to be commercially competitive, and the quality of the programmes goes up - the incentive is to make something that people want to listen to.

£130 well spent, I think...

Thieves is a little strong, but...

[Rakarra]

.. he does have a point, in that commercial TV is supported by.. surprise surprise, commercials!! Commercial advertisers pay money to networks with the expectation that people will see the commercials. If that doesn't happen then the advertisers don't get a return on their money. The advertisers aren't paying for a commercial to simply run, they're paying for a commercial to be run and for people to see it. That's why networks charge more for a timeslot during the Superbowl or during popular programs. Sure, they know not everyone watching a program will see the commercial, but they can be sure a good percentage will. For a device to come around that makes this truly common.. now that's when it becomes dangerous enough to be attacked. The RIAA never cared enough about a few people swapping .wav files or .mp3's over irc... but Napster, Napster became a threat. Advertisers put up with VCRs, because even with those you're still getting a fair amount of the commercial. But a device where you don't even know what commercial aired? The commercial that is paying for the program? It should be no surprise advertisers aren't thrilled about that. And if these devices become popular? Should be no surprise again that they go on the attack. Network TV isn't commercial free, it's not supposed to be. Comments about whether or not this would be a good thing aside, the networks and channels like Cartoon Network, Sci-Fi, Food channel, History Channel.. none of these would survive without people actually watching the commercials that run. Or does everyone look forward to every channel running PBS-like pledge drives?

This is the same argument that comes up when people complain about banner ads in websites. Commercial TV needs either advertising, or else they have to become a pay channel like HBO. Slashdot needs to run advertisements to survive or just become a pay site. So does Salon.

All of them are supported by advertising, advertising which requires viewers for it to work. Saying that PVR users are thieves is... a little extreme, and somewhat silly, but to strip commercials completely out of programs is being a little dishonest.

Re:Thieves is a little strong, but...

[johnw]

There seems to be a growing misconception that, because a business model has worked in the past it therefore must be entitled to legal protection in order to ensure it continues to work in the future.

Consider the position of being, say, a musician a few hundred years ago. You could make a living (probably not a very good one) by composing and playing music for other people but, much like a plumber today you couldn't apply any multipliers to that. You play music for one evening - you get paid (or fed or something) a corresponding amount. If you want to be paid again tomorrow, make sure you have another gig lined up. The only way of avoiding that would be to find a rich sponsor.

Along came printing - suddenly there was a way for musicians (and others) to get the multiplication factor in. Write a piece of music and then *sell* it. You only have to write it once but you can sell it lots of times.

Along came audio recording - an even bigger multiplier. Now you don't even have to play it for each listener. Play it once (all right - I know - several times), record it, then sell it lots of times. You're not guaranteed to make lots of money that way but the potential is there and it's a perfectly reasonable thing to do (and it's perfectly reasonable to insist that others comply by the restrictions you choose to put on your material when you sell it - copyright).

What is *not* reasonable is then to expect legislation simply to preserve your business model from other perfectly legitimate business models. If you're producing and selling recorded music you have absolutely no right to insist that others can't distribute *their* music in a different way, even if it blows your business model right out of the water.

Similarly with the question of commercial TV channels. 100 years ago there were no commercial TV channels (bliss!). A particular combination of available technologies made them feasible (TVs available at prices consumers can afford; cameras and broadcasting kit available at prices consumers definitely can't afford; limited broadcast bandwidth available etc.) Now the technology position is moving on. Lots of new equipment is available and people may not be willing to make the same trade-off as before ("I'll watch your irritating adverts because I want to watch the program in the gaps"), particularly as the quality of both programs and adverts goes through the floor. Perhaps an entirely new business model will have to arise but there is absolutely no possible justification for legislation to protect an existing business model just because its window of opportunity is closing.

Tivo by law

[nexex]

Actually, what Ted doesn't realize is that I use my Tivo so I don't miss any commercials. When I leave the room to get a snack that I saw advertised in the previouse commercial break, I can pause the signal so I don't miss any valuable and high quality advertisements for useful goods and services! Its the people WITHOUT PVRs that are really costing them money.
So, basically I think the networks should make it mandatory that everyone have a Tivo and buy them for everyone. Of course, those of us that already have them would get a credit for a big hard drive.

Re:Contract with the networks

[Golias]

An FCC license in a minimal expense compared to what it cost to run a broadcast station. An FCC license is provided (at a small fee) in exchange for keeping other would-be broadcasters from crouding out your signal, it is not a lease of the frequency itself. Use of the frequency is allowed for free, and in exchange, the broadcaster must agree to serve the public interest. Serving the pubic interest, for these purposes, include doing whatever the FCC says is required, (i.e., broadcasting news updates and station ID each hour on radio stations, playing PSA's, etc.)

If broadcasting rights were parceled out like land, and auctioned to the highest bidder, the would cost an order of magnatude higher than an FCC license fee. The market value of bandwiths is huge.

All this is actually off-topic though, because Turner networks are all cable channels, and therefore are not regulated by the FCC. They can broadcast whatever the fuck they want, and no, there is no implied contract that you will watch their ads, because you are paying a cable company to watch their channel, who in turn pays them, and the requirements of all parties are spelled out in black and white on your cable subscription agreement.

The Turner rep who said this is actually flat-out wrong.

All day long I feel like a criminal

[eyeball]

We're seeing an increase of law abiding citizens being treated like criminals in so many parts of our society. Every day we are being combarded with copy protection technology, security screenings, identifications, background and credit checks, etc. I really wonder if someday someone is going to do a study and find that the psychological effects of going through most of life not being trusted is causing all sorts of issues, like incrased stress, depression, family problems, etc... At the very least, one has to wonder if being treated like a criminal would start to make someone act like a criminial.

Let's see...

[Rogerborg]

If I go out of my way actively to avoid an advert, what exactly are the chances that I would buy the product if I'd watched it? Quantify your answer, please.

Advertising is a crock, an utter crock. Advertising is something you spend between X and Y% of your budget on, because that's what market analysts expect, and if you do something unusual, you're high risk. The only people who pretend to believe that it actually does anything are advertising executives and the people carrying the adverts. Note: "pretend".

Oh, sorry, let's also include in that delusional group "e-advertisers". Because god knows that click-through adverts have really being pulling in the revenue, right?

Once again for luck: overt advertising doesn't work! Actually, even advertisers know this, which is why they are so keen on product placement (place the product with the content, or place the content (e.g. of Britney's brassiere) with the product) rather than trying to actually sell the product on merits.

I'm quite happy for the delusions to continue though: I mean, it's paying for this great free ride that we're all enjoying right now. But for anyone in the industry to actually claim that it matters that we watch commercials is crackpot delusion, pure and simple.

Hey, this sounds familiar

[mikemulvaney]

It seems like someone else was complaining that blocking ads was stealing services(this was around 15:34):

<hemos> Here's the reality:
You block ads.
You cost us money.
Ultimately, I mean.

-Mike