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News on TiVo, "God's Machine"
Brace for incoming TiVo news!
rtphokie pointed out that FCC chair Michael Powell got a TiVo for Christmas and calls it
"God's machine."
Powell also said he wanted to share TV shows with his sister -- but he might have to violate the DMCA to do it: TiVo wants to
join the home network
(thanks Insomniac), but parr pointed us to
TiVo's Thursday press release
in which they assure us that "every TiVo Series2 DVR contains a unique public/private key pair," so only "designated" units within your home can share programs, you "cannot send content outside the home," and transfers over your home network will be encrypted (no sniffing!). Meanwhile, on the WB (part of AOL-TW), everything old is new again, as producers and advertisers work to create a live variety show with
built-in commercials (free reg. req.) (thanks eternal_software).
And if you missed our earlier TiVoesque stories, check 'em out:
TiVo-radio wanted,
HDTV TiVo,
and
TiVo Rendezvous. Whew!
I have a Tivo. It has absolutely made TV interesting again. Ignore the obnoxious monthly fee arguments you always see in these threads because they are almost always started by someone who has never used a Tivo. However, the best thing you can do is go to google for 'replay tivo comparison'. You'll end up finding something like this. Feature by feature breakdown, and a pretty good guide. hth.
"Built-in commercials" worked in the days of old because there was no such thing as syndication. A program aired once (usually live) and that was it. So you had sponsors paying for that airtime, and they got their advertising in.
Not so today.
When a program is recorded, space is left for the commercials. They usually don't even know who the sponsors are yet. Then the commercials are added later. A season or two later, if it's a popular program, it's all picked up for syndication (a wild process involving conventions and stations and networks and lots of wheeling-and-dealing). The station or network airing the program in syndication will be putting in a completely different set of commercials.
See the problem here? If the commercials are irrevocably embedded into the program, they can't be removed and replaced during syndication. That means it won't syndicate at all, because the cable networks and superstations of the world won't be able to put in their own commercials. They won't be able to make back the money they paid for the programming. So, they'll either choose other programming, or if this style of programming becomes dominant, the smaller stations and networks may go away entirely.
It's kind of like forcing people to take a web browser or media player with an operating system, whether they want it or not. It puts people's eyeballs where you want them in the short term, but it screws up the flexibility for pretty much everyone else in the universe.
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Putting adds in the content, or having the content members plug stuff is not new. Soap operas are called "soap operas" because they were shows pormoted exclusivley for a single advertiser. Some shows required the story to involve laundry scenes where the "whiteness of your whites" could be commented upon. Ed sullivan, groucho marx, and all the rest used to plug the products right in the show, reading the ads.
I imagine they went to the "modern" format of distinct ads becaause they were deemed more effective at catching viewer attention. Now the pendulum swings back.
A freind told me that in some european country, italy perhaps, there are certain shows or channels that only have ads at the begining and ends. The response of the adveritsers is to make comercials so good that you really want to watch. Which of course is sort odd segwaying back into making whole shows again with embedded comercials.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I have a ReplayTV. It's the PVR for folks who like more features, but less stability. :)
Built-in LAN access. Ability to offload shows (MPEG2, no funky wrappers or encryption) to PC. Stream shows from one ReplayTV to another, or (with third-party GPL software, like DVArchive) stream to a PC. Or stream from a PC's archive of shows back to your ReplayTV. Better quality video capture than Tivo, better search. Not so good season / show recording options as Tivo (the inability to determine if a show is a repeat or not, or even if you already have a copy of that show on the unit, is a stupid oversight). But there's strong indication that ReplayTV is going to add features in the near future via software upgrade.
ReplayTV also has Commercial Advance (works 70% of the time; I don't use it) and 30-second skip, which I use religiously. Tivo also has 30s skip, but it's an unsupported software hack that they could disable at any time.
Sharing TV shows non-commercially would not have violated the original 1790 law, which covered only "vending" of protected works.
You know it's majority shareholders are the networks, right?
BUZZ!
It's true that General Electric, who owns NBC along with a whole lot of other things, is the largest shareholder, but that's only 1.78% of the company. Every other shareholder in the top ten is an investment bank or mutual fund company.
Don't trust me? look it up for yourself.
The networks do not control Tivo. A clear majority of the company is in the hands of non-network interests. Tivo has no majority owner.