Slashdot Mirror
An Offer Tivo Owners Can't Refuse
An anonymous reader pointed us to this little tidbit. The BBC paid Tivo (company slogan: "TV Your Way") to force owners' boxes to record some new program they wanted to push, which looks incredibly exciting. UK Tivo owners seem a little upset.
Does it force you to play them?
And what's stopping stations from turning off the commercial-skipping feature through similar bribery?
What you said. The hardware's available for peanuts. (A cheap-azz Duron or P3 or P4-Northwood box, plus an older ATI-Rage-128-based capture card is all that's really needed here.)
The only thing missing from the open alternatives today is the software. (If I were a good enough designer/coder, I'd do it myself. Sadly, I've gotta wait 'till others, with madder sk1llz than I, get around to it.)
Any of you coder-d00dz wanna brew up an "embedded" Linux distro? Ideally, this could even be a turnkey solution -- "Buy hard drive. Buy supported video card. Boot from floppy. Insert CD-ROM with disk image. Reboot. Done."
If I buy a box, the hard drive is mine, not the advertiser's.
(I'd be very interested in knowing, from Tivo owners, if the advertiser-mandated download pushed off any content you were archiving. I'm disgusted by, but could tolerate, a Tivo recording stuff without my knowledge or consent, so long as programs I wanted to keep were preserved. If I owned a Tivo, I would never tolerate an advertiser overwriting a show I'd recorded on my Tivo's hard drive in favor of its own content.)
And since Tivo execs are reading this -- if your advertising (which is what "records a show when the show's owners pay you enough" really means) does overwrite user-saved content, I'll never purchase your product, for any reason whatsoever.
While not exactly the same as this, I noticed recently that at around 2:30am, my Tivo asked if it could change the channel to record "data which was part of the Tivo service".
Curious, I agreed. TiVo tuned in to the Discovery channel, where a rapidly-changing full-screen barcode was being broadcast with a small text box in the center that said the broadcast was part of the TiVo service.
After Tivo was done a few minutes later, I noticed Sheryl Crow's new music video was prominently displayed in "Now Showing".
- James
As the moderator posts on the TiVo boards point out, the recording is made to a reserved part of the system, so no space is lost, and does not interrupt any other recording the users may have been doing. So, in that respect, it's not actually as offensive as it sounds.
What does strike me as dubious is, "The Dossa & Jo promo contains some bad language and is unsuitable for younger viewers. Parental controls are not effective so be careful." (quoted from Gary Sargent, a moderator at TiVo).
What they are saying is, "Regardless of how you try to protect your children's viewing habits, we will disable your controls and make whatever content we feel like accessible to anyone who uses the box - and this may well be your children who are in from school before you." Not only do they disable the parental controls, due to the nature of the TiVo unit, they also make [potentially] adult material available outside of the carefully regulated UK "watershed".
So, how long before a TV channel wants to get viewing figures up on some late night porn dressed up as a documentary and a nation comes home the next day to find their kids happily watching away at 5pm?
I think a million Tivo subscribers returning their boxes would be a fine educational example for Tivo, BBC, and any marketroids who read about this and thought "oooh...now that's a way to increase our market share".
And what would they learn from that? Tivo owners have already paid for the box, and will not get the money back. The only loss of income Tivo would face would be from those customers who were paying for their listings monthly, instead of ponying up the "lifetime" fee. I'm sure this would be offset by the amount of free hardware they could refurbish and resell to ohers, and collect new listing fees from... besides, if these are a large percentage of the original Tivo boxes, and not the Series2, it could speed up them killing off support for the original boxes.
Get off my launchpad!
One: I stopped watching TV because the ads enraged me.
Two: I've been keeping an eye on the Tivo on the off chance television ever becomes economical (eg- I can get sci fi without having to get 37 other channels I never watch)
Does anybody else see the irony, here? For somebody who seems to want his entertainment for free or very little cost, you sure do bitch a lot about commercials. You can't have it both ways, man.
Amen, brother. That's why I don't own a PVR. I want one that doesn't need to phone home, and can get its programming info from the guide channel or something. Am I reduced to the Linux PVR project? I'd rather not build my own.
I spent a year in Iraq looking for WMD and all I found was this lousy sig.
TiVo has been toying around with this ever since the 2.5 software came out in the US. TiVo uses these recordings for good as well as evil.
In the 3.0 software, TiVos will now download a large chunk of their data from these special programs. TiVo does this by buying a late-night paid programming slot on the Discovery Channel. The actual show looks like a screen full of CC data, and there is a major upside to receiving these datacasts. They significantly shorten the length of daily phone calls. Bonus. (Not to mention that the 3.0 software on Series 2 units unofficially supports update-over-internet...)
As has been stated over and over, the special recordings don't take up usable space. A portion of the MFS filesystem is flagged as Reserved, and this is where the data goes. TiVo downloads a promo, it runs its course, and disappears. It also will never switch to record the show if you have something else set to record in the same time slot, so it's not even very intrusive. And in the US (not sure about the UK), the time slot is early in the AM when you're not likely to have programs scheduled to record anyways.
Regardless, the promos aren't that intrusive, don't take up recording space, and don't interfere with your recordings. Plus, Embeem has created a script to remove the ads, which has been around for quite a while, so you can remove the ads yourself if you're horribly offended.
So long story short, this is not a crisis situation. You're not forced to watch the ads, and its easy to ignore them. Hell, you can even remove them yourself with a little trickery. What's the big deal?
If an extra menu item in TiVo Central with an icon next to it is enough to make you refuse to buy or even return your TiVo, ESPECIALLY since Embeem offers you a script to remove the menu item yourself, feel free to take your TiVo back to its point of sale. It just means less complaint postings in the TiVo Forums for the rest of us to wade through.
As a Brit, and a TV owner, what I want to know is why the BBC is spending licence-payers money on this sort of thing? What does trying to force people to watch programmes they don't want to to do with quality broadcasting?
And yes, I know they weren't forced to actually watch it - but surely it isn't appropriate for them to be spending this money telling people they were wrong when they looked in the Radio Times and went 'nah, I don't want to watch this'...
Unless the agreement I assume UK Tivo owners have to agree to for service covers this, isn't this some form of invasion of privacy?
Oh wait. I forgot, that's all gone in the UK.
Yeah, troll away. Be an ignorant fool all your life. Take the easy option.
For your information, the British do have some legally enshrined rights to privacy, some granted by British law, others granted by European Union law.
Included in these is Britain's Data Protection Act. Basically, the DPA governs every detail of how companies treat all the computer-held data that they have on their customers, employees, etc.
One nice benefit of the DPA is that I can demand a company disclose all the information that they have on me. They can charge a nominal fee for this (£10 ~ US$15) but they must comply within a set time limit. And, obviously, if their information is incorrect or harmful in any way they can be made to correct it (and I have the right to take appropriate legal action if I want to).
Now, I can demand that of my credit card provider, my bank, my doctor, my employer, my accountant, my gym, my golf club or anyone else who holds information about me. Try asking that of similar institutions in the US and elsewhere and see how far you get.
Yes, our laws are different. Yes, you have some rights that you'd cut off your right arm than give up (gun ownership anyone?) but, remember, we have some that you'd cut off the other one too to have.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
"I have a non-Tivo PVR that does not have a monthly fee and does not spy on my TV viewing habits. "
I have a TiVo that does not have a monthly fee and does not spy on my TV viewing habits. So that's a strange coincidence. Maybe you could have gotten a TiVo if only you did some homework first.
"Now what would people say if Microsoft pulled a similar trick? "
The Windows 95 cd came with a Weezer video. I don't remember anyone complaining that their CD space was being used for things they didn't care to watch.
" If there was a genuinely free market in DVRs the features would be determined by the capability of the technology rather than the business model of the vendor... Fortunately there are Tivo competitors, "
uh, so you're saying IF there X exists then Y wouldn't happen. But then you say X does exist, but somehow Y is happening. Wow! that's logic for you.
You really have to understand how the TiVo works to understand this is part of what you paid for. I never once heard anyone complain about TiVo Takes (A weekly TV magazine that spotlighted next weeks cool shows) when it was airing. But suddenly TiVo records something you don't like and you're up in arms asking for the very feature people love to be stipped away because they don't understand it.
If you haven't used a TiVo it's likely you simply don't understand that this is a cool feature and not an outrage.
Joseph Elwell.