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You're Watching Less TV
NickFusion writes "With a plethora of online games, chat, IM, email and, well, Slashdot, who's got time to watch television? Evidently, not men ages 18-34. The NY Times (free reg, etc) takes a look at the issue and comes to conclusions that will shock, I say shock, the average Slashdot reader. Meanwhile, Fox Broadcasting Corp. is calling for a recount. Disclosure: I'm quoted in the NY Times article, and so is one Rob Malda. Mom will be so proud!"
Wasn't it a Fox exec who commented that not watching the commercials was theft?
Obviously we must ban video games and the Internet because they are stealing potential revenue from the media companies!
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
...can be found here.
I use GNU VCD imager (http://www.vcdimager.org/) under linux (I believe it also works in Windows with Cygwin). It's as easy as 'vcdimager -t svcd input.mpg', then you burn the resulting bin/cue. Of course, the inputs have to be in the correct mpeg formats, so I tend to spend more time reencoding AVIs than actually watching them.
Pretty much all DVD players will play s/VCDs, as long as they're built to spec.
While we're on the subject, what's the deal with these dinks cropping the top and bottom of 4:3 vids and calling them 'widescreen hdtv' encodes? Pisses me off no end, since my DVD is not smart enough to recenter the picture, and it only uses the top half of my TV.
Build your own... I did, and despite the fact that it can cost in excess of $500, it is well worth it. SageTV offers predictive recording, which is quite excellent, and the real bonus is that using DScaler and FFDshow, you can render the analog TV signal at near DVD quality, far more clear than is offered by TiVo.
Just as irrigation is the lifeblood of the Southwest, lifeblood is the soup of cannibals. -- Jack Handy
It is not theft. It is copyright infringement.
Both are crimes, but theft is the illicit transfer of value from one person to another. The thief gains and the victim loses by the same amount. In copyright infringement, value does not transfer. They are fundamentally different. If you must use an analogy, copyright infringement is more akin to trespassing than it is to theft.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
First, why are you downloading it off of P2P when a taped- or digital-recording is *much* better quality since it's direct from the source?
I disagree about the quality. I do a fair amount of recording from tv to computer, and I don't think a blanket statement like this can be fairly applied. There's quite a few factors that need to be taken into consideration. Firstly, the actual recording medium. If it's a vhs tape, then there's a few negatives there right from the start. Unless it's never been used before, there's already going to be some degradation of quality right there. And if he wants it stored digitally, then that's going to be increased in the transfer, on top of the additional noise from the compression. The quality of his capture card is another thing that has to be factored in. If that's not a high quality device, then he's looking at another minus. I don't care how high a bitrate someone's encoding at, if they have a bad source the end result is going to suffer for it. On the other hand, if someone's recording to a high quality digital format, and then compressing it to a net friendly size isn't going to hurt it that much. I don't think there's going to be much difference in an ATHF episode encoded at 900kbs or one encoded at 5000kbs. So, depending on the equipment available, there very likely could be a gain in quality of end product from downloading off of the internet. As long as we're talking about a source that knows what it's doing, not some 10mb encode off kazza.
Though, on the other hand, in the case of ATHF he'd also be missing the Adult Swim cards - a pretty big loss in my opinion, but oh well.
Everything will be taken away from you.
Women have all the spending power these days, even if its their mans money they're using. Advertisers want to sell to these women, so they make ads for the women. TV stations want to sell ad time so in an effort to increase advertiser interest in an already cutthroat market, they put on more and more shows that would attract female viewers. This has the obvious side effect of alienating the male 18-35 demographic.
And these execs wonder why Sopranos has the ratings it does, or Adult Swim on Cartoon Network. Jesus. I'm in advertising/marketing and this is the most obvious problem in the world, especially since I fit into the "missing" demographic.
We are entering a world where the old solution of casting out a huge net and seeing what you get is no longer nearly as effective as it once was. The future is in niche market advertising and those who adopt early will reap the rewards.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Courtesy http://www.m-w.com (Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary)
Take:
1 : to get into one's hands or into one's possession, power, or control: as a : to seize or capture physically <took them as prisoners>
One can not "Take" intellectual property, one could take the media it is on but the IP itself can only be copied. If it can not be taken then by your definition above, there can be no theft.
I've done this on Stargate SG-1, and more recently my wife has as well.
A well done "alternate world" show (more general then sci-fi, and there are some sci-fi shows that IMHO wouldn't qualify, most notably Star Trek) benefits amazingly from the immersion you can do if you want.... if it doesn't scare you too much.
Television shows on DVD are two or three times better then TV shows on TiVo, which are themselves three or four times better then the TV show broken up by commercials all the time. The ability to watch, uninterrupted by more then a few seconds, three or four episodes in a row is awesome.
One particular Stargate arc that is really enhanced by this is the one that starts with Upgrades and ends with Divide and Conquer (3 episodes total). Much more compelling drama as a ~2 hour single event then three seperate episodes.