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Cable Companies Despise PVRs
My position that I expressed in my speech and that was inaccurately portrayed: PVR functionality should be provisioned from the headend for the following reasons (which ultimately will benefit consumers):
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VOD servers cost much less
- If video servers @ $350/stream (Soon Component cost declining 40%/year
- @ 10% simultaneous use, costs $35/sub.
- PVRs cost >10X more
- When simultaneous use = 50%, server costs will have declined >5X
- Disk noise wakes my wife
- Replay box hot enough to fry an egg -- Is that a feature?
- Disk size limitations mean obsolescence, esp. with HDTV
- Available on every set-top in house Average of 1.7 PVRs/PVR household
- No pro-activity/anticipation required
- Records multiple concurrent shows
- NW storage could always have max. res.
- Uses existing deployed base
- Moving parts break more often
- Box complexity means more crashes & customer support costs
My basic thesis is that PVRs + Satellite will eat cable's lunch, and since it's unambiguous that cable needs to get the copyright clearances to offer programming from the head-end, they should start now. It is the case that I suggested that if a Supreme Court case was brought on the legality of each feature of PVRs were brought, some would lose. I also suggested an alternative business model to make everybody happy to avoid the all-or-nothing result that has been occurring in the RIAA vs. Napster wars.
I suggested that consumers pay 1 cent per commercial skipped (which is about the same as what advertisers pay). That would be equivalent to $10/thousand commercials skipped. I think that's reasonable. I also suggested that targeted advertising could be a win-win for all involved by delivering ads in areas that are of greater interest to the viewer so that there would be less incentive to skip and fewer ads would have to be delivered due to the higher prices paid for the targeted group. I also predicted that this dynamic combined with competition between satellite and cable would ultimately make both services free."
If cable companies despise PVRs, why does AT&T sell Tivo, branded under their cable service?
PVRs are in no way like Napster, in the past, present or future. PVRs are like tape decks, VCRs, etc.
PVRs make the TV viewer happier, so that they WATCH MORE TV.
What do the cable companies and advertisers want you to do? WATCH MORE TV!
They need to get their heads out of their asses and realize just like how they were wrong about VCRs destroying the movie industry, they're wrong about this now.
It's amazing how these companies stay in business... One might think their monopolies had something to do with it.
The words of one CEO shouldn't always reflect the opinion of the industry. AT&T has sent me a few offers to buy a TiVo directly through them.
What I don't understand is if I pay for cable programming, why the hell am I double-taxed by having to watch ads?!!!
They've been ripping me off for years, even before PVRs existed!
BASTARDS!
Hey, I'm only applying the same specious reasiong the media companies use to call me a pirate, a criminal and an ingrate!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I remember when the great thing about cable was the absence of commericals, movies running their entire length etc. (At least, that was the rumor -- my household didn't get cable until far later).
...)
But it's like buying the Sunday paper -- the ads subsidize the (fairly low) cover price. Cable TV would cost more (or very well could) if they didn't also get funding from ads. (And Premium channels that *do* run uninterrupted movies are one example
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
I can understand why cable companies are openly against PVRs with commercial skip and commercial removal capabilities, but why wasn't there this much of an outcry over VHS devices with the same commercial avoidance features?
The bottom line here is FairUse and the unfortunate news for them is once that signal enters your home (provided you haven't used any illegal methods for decoding it) its yours to do whatever you personally want to do with it (i.e. not rebroadcasting).
If you love your PVR, the cable industry is not your friend.
/rant
I don't have a PVR, but I can't recall a time when the cable industry has ever been my friend. $45 for exteneded basic cable services, and what do you get? 70 channels of ads. I can't stand watching TV! Slowly but surely commercial length is increasing while show time is decreasing. 1/3 of a 30 minute segment is commercials. Sure the PVR would fix that but even before this article everyone knew that someone was going to cry foul. The cable industry is just like the rest of the content industries, as soon as the content control is in our hands they bring in the lawsuits because they don't want to change.
Screw it! I'm about to move and I've already decided that I'm not going to pay the money every month to have junk piped to my home.
The Anti-Blog
A good consumer will WATCH MORE ADS !
Sorry guys, but that just has no value to me. Watching TV shows does have some value to me, such that I will pay for cable, and (maybe) watch ads. But the whole point of the broadcast system is to get people to buy stuff.
[important]
(Of course, the FCC grants licenses to broadcasters with the understanding that they will serve the public good. Hey, kind of like how copyright law gives someone a grant on a public domain with the view that it will serve the public good. And just like copyright, these companies have forgotten (or ignored) that they're being a special dispensation with the understanding that they will give something back in return.)
[/important]
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
One of my coworkers got VOD around the same time I got TiVo. I LOVE my TiVo but my coworker ended up dumping his VOD service because of the lousy selection of shows. Yes, the service was "on demand", but the movies never changed from month to month. He probably would have kept it if the selection was actually good.
Once again, maybe cable companies should consider taking a look at improving their own products instead of trying to shut down technology they don't like. Other industries actually have to produce a better product to ensure they get customers' money. I hate that the entertainment industry is taking the approach that it is better to just shut down any technology that threatens their desired business model than to react to the market and improve their product. How anti-capitalist.
When violence rules the world outside / And the headlines make me want to cry / It's not the time to just keep quiet
Than oligopolies are not your friend. Any time you have a cartel that makes their money by controlling a means of distribution, they will fight tooth and nail against anything that threatens to make the distribution DIFFERENT in any way (except in exact ways of their choosing, of course). Just different - they hate open-ness, too, but it's change that they hate. Why?
Because they derive their profits by gaming the system. Any change in the rules by which the system works is a threat to them - the fact that their sector, whatever it may be, might expand overall is irrelevant. They're on top now because they're perfectly situated to control things as they stand. Now that an oligopoly is in place, and everything is arranged to their liking, they don't want to rock the boat.
In IT you notice it particularly, but it is also true in energy, in agriculture, in real eastate and even in manufacturing.
My personal belief is that if this goes unchecked it will be the death of western civilization (assuming our contempt for our own environment doesn't get us first, except that is really part and parcel of the same phenomenon.)
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
So enjoy it while you can. I do. I watch (some) commercial TV and I don't watch the ads. Many execs would have you believe that this is some sort of theft. But as Robert Heinlein said:
"There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statue or common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back."
Aren't they going to create a bandwidth crunch with 90% of the video being "demanded" in prime time?
Why wouldn't it be very much more to their advantage to have "offpeak pricing" for customers with PVR's that were willing to record content at times convenient for the cable company? And have the PVR owner pay for the storage facility?
Seems to me that if video-on-demand takes off cable companies will be faced with either expensive infrastructure costs... OR ticked-off customers trying to explain to their kids why they can't watch "Lilo and Stitch" tonight.
Or are the cable companies planning to build special you-don't-control-it-we-do PVR's? In which case you'd think they wouldn't want to make the PVR companies angry, unless the cable companies want to do all their own R&D...
Or are the cable companies just planless and clueless?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
It not has gotten to the point where I actually tune out commercials. I might watch the commercial, but the rentention of the commercial is ZERO.... Now I am even in the habit of doing something else during the commercial, since they take so long. It is really interesting to see.
If I see the commercial again I will remember it, but if not in the context of the commercial I do not even remember it. Does it influence me to buy the product? Absolutely not. In the grocery store or shopping mall I do compartive shopping and ask the store help. At that point I will make a decision. And if I like the product then I will buy it again.
I think the problem with the big cable companies is that advertising in the current model DOES NOT WORK anymore. People get so much advertising that they have taught themselves to tune out...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
After testing PVRs in 2000, Comcast found that downloading programming to a hard drive in a consumer's home via a PVR such as TiVo, which satellite leader DirecTV uses, threatens the lifeblood of TV entertainment, Roberts said.
After reading this, one might walk away thinking that that Comcast invented TV entertainment. While nothing could be further from the truth, it's precisely this kind of arrogance that will lead to the demise of companies who, rather than seeking to understand what consumers value, work to shackle them with tight controls over how, when, and for how much various shows can be viewed.
Is it any mystery that consumers will attempt to minimize the level of harrassment by commercial entities attempting to sell them the latest and greatest of everything from the latest super-steam-powered convection oven to tampons? The reason that cable owners are concerned is that they assumed that they would be able burn the candle at both ends, charging for both content and ads, ad infinitum. PVRs enter the market, and now PVR owners, who maximize their enjoyment by skipping the cruft, are being branded criminals.
What can be learned here? For starters, there is no comparison between Napster users and PVR owners. Perhaps most important, though, is that there's a real honest-to-goodness clue here with respect to consumer interests. The issue is not that people are using PVRs, but whether or not the cable industry will have the foresight to adapt their business model, rather than force feed its 'content' - replete with all of the ad-gak - to its customers.
I have a huge collection of DVD's exactly because I don't like to watch movies on someone else's timetable. Unfortunately, however, I'm starting to get so many that it's hard to keep track of them all. I'd sign up for netflix, but the thought of mailing all of those DVD's back and forth sounds like a pain. PVR's provide the perfect solution. Let me have 3 or 5 or 10 movies at any one time, and as soon I delete one from my PVR, the next one on my list gets downloaded automatically. Maybe it takes 8 or 12 hours to download, but that's still better than netflix can do. Hell, I'd even watch a commercial or two at the beginning of the feature, as long as I had to option to skip through an excessive list. Once again, we have to drag the media companies kicking and screaming into the future where they will make more money than ever. You could even set it up so each family member could have thier own listing of shows so that ad's could be targeted perfectly. I don't care how many commercials they force me to watch, I'm just not going to buy any tampons, get over it. Let me skip the commercial. If you want to throw them into my wife's shows, however, be my guest. I'd bet that's true for 80% of the commercials people watch. This technology could give advertisers direct feedback on how to get people to actually watch commercials. What could be a more powerful sales tool than that. Give me a 30 second commercial at the beginning of the show, and another 30 seconds at the end. I'll probably watch them rather than getting up to get a sandwich or take a bathroom break every 15 minutes.
Gary Lauder's arguments are remarkably full of false assumptions.
... that PVRs + Satellite will eat cable's lunch" should be an argument for cable to add PVRs. At least, that's the obvious conclusion that I see.
Many of his points are a comparison of VOD vs. PVR. The main problem here is that these are two different things. A PVR will let you control everything you watch, while I'm sure VOD will only be used for movies and events. Arguing that you should do one instead of the other is silly, since the consumer would do best to have both.
Lauder comments on PVR noise. My friend recently got a new Dish 508 PVR. When he turned it on, I heard absolutely nothing. Zero. The hard drive was running, and it was dead silent. Credit new hard drive technology.
The 508 also has a fan, but I never heard it running (after it was on for a good while). Just because one box (the Replay he mentions) isn't well-designed for heat output, doesn't mean they all are like that. Again, this is an issue fixed by technology.
Lauder also says "Disk size limitations mean obsolescence, esp. with HDTV". Is there ANY device that's going to handle the transition to HDTV gracefully? The size issue is not really an issue if the disk is "big enough" to begin with. I think that at 40-80GB, we're at "big enough" for most people. In any case, the obsolescence argument applies to VOD servers just as well.
Lauder's only arguments that have any bite are:
- Moving parts break more often
- Box complexity means more crashes & customer support costs
The crashing issue is more a reflection on poor software engineering (and probably that due to poor scheduling) than anything else, however. PVR software could be made bulletproof, in time.
Customer support is always going to be an issue wherever you add new features. So this argument will apply to ANY new features added, not just PVR.
Lauder's "basic thesis
His comment that "if a Supreme Court case was brought on the legality of each feature of PVRs were brought, some would lose" is just a swipe. There's very little that a PVR does that a VCR doesn't let you do already. The only difference is the spontaneity and the time you have to wait before you can watch. The only questionable features are those added by the newest Replay box (trading programs over the net), which are not core PVR features. If lobbyists make politicians make VCRs illegal, then perhaps there may be a case.
Lauder's final comment regarded commercials. It should be pointed out that even with a PVR, you cannot skip commercials while watching live TV. Doing so requires planning head to watch delayed TV. If you're going to sit down and flip channels, you're still limited to watching live TV.
Lauder thinks consumers should pay for commercials skipped. If that makes sense, then what about paying consumers for commercials watched repeatedly? That makes sense too, right?
> My position that I expressed in my speech and
> that was inaccurately portrayed: PVR functionality
> should be provisioned from the headend for the
> following reasons (which ultimately will benefit
> consumers):
Yeah, ok... and when you're not in the major metropolitan area that has actual competition (more than one cable company in a market - aka Boston areas) like, oh, say Maine or West Nowheresville, KS or Hotashell, NV you have to wait for the cable company to get around to supplying you with this ability. Just like cable modems, people won't wait.
Sure, if you want to provision VOD or PVR from the headend, get off your lazy-cable-monopoly-butt and DO IT! PROVE US WRONG! Make it work and prove us nay-sayers wrong. Don't just say 'this is bad - you should do it our way instead' - then not have your way available outside a lab or a tiny test market area.
Face it cable companies, you're behind the times on this one and you've lost the edge you could have had.
Wow,, that's a rant, but what do you expect from someone who owns a domain like Adelphia Sucks.com
-- There is no sig line, only Zuul.