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TiVo Has to Fund Your Local Stadium
Strudelkugel writes "The Washington Post has a truly Kafka-esque article regarding TiVo, the broadcast flag, the NFL and limited file sharing. "TiVo, the company that makes the digital-video-recorder boxes that inspire such strange idolatry among their users, is in a weird spot. It's asking the Federal Communications Commission for permission to add a new feature -- the option for a TiVo user to send recorded digital TV programs via the Internet to nine other people." Just wait until your read the rest of the story..." This one is actually really worth a read to see just how bizarrely corrupt this all is. Enjoy.
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Enjoy.
Understand that TiVo itself is no hero. Its proposed system is thoroughly hobbled. The people to whom you'd send recordings online would need you to add them to a "secure viewing group" by ordering special security keys for their Windows computers, associated with your TiVo bill. Each viewer would need to plug one such key into a PC to receive, watch or edit your recordings.
Makes me wonder if they will ask for the contact info of the receiver/viewer friend also?
There are a lot of people who would argue otherwise.
The truth is, mayors and governors win and lose elections based on whether they're able to bring in and/or retain a NFL/MLB/NBA franchise. The economic argument is nothing but a smokescreen of legitimacy over the whole stinking process.
As much as it pains me to defend himm W doesn't use e-mail because of the legal implications, not because he doesn't know how. He was by all accounts quite an active e-mailer when governor of Texas
Then, we can vote for third party candidates.
Quite the contrary, the reason schools often turn a blind eye to the recruiting shenanigans in major college sports is because they are huge money makers, both directly and in alumni fund-raising.
Actually, you'd be surprised how closely they pay attention to these sorts of things. In order to receive sports packages, the unit must be connected to a phone line. They can (and do) verify the origin of the calls... and they will see this "LA" box calling from Oakland.
They've ruined NFL Sunday Ticket (tm) anyway... if any local station, even those DTV doesn't carry, claims to be carrying a game, it gets blacked out to force you to want the local broadcast station. In my experience over the past few years, DTV has been wrong 90% of the time. (And the local station guide data is correctly listing the right game.) And that damned "enhanced screen" is enough to get me to cancel my entire DTV.
(And it's DTV who have a case for fraud and possibly breach on contract.)
Skip the registration BS:
TiVo vs. the Broadcast Flag Wavers
By Rob Pegoraro
The Washington Post
Sunday, August 1, 2004; Page F06
TiVo, the company that makes the digital-video-recorder boxes that inspire such strange idolatry among their users, is in a weird spot. It's asking the Federal Communications Commission for permission to add a new feature -- the option for a TiVo user to send recorded digital TV programs via the Internet to nine other people.
Huh? Permission? Doesn't the government's involvement in consumer electronics stop with making sure that a gadget doesn't jam your neighbor's reception or electrocute you? Since when do the feds get to vote on product designs?
The answer is, since last November, when the FCC voted to require manufacturers to support the "broadcast flag" system by July 1 of next year. This convoluted mechanism aims to stop full-quality copies of digital broadcasts from circulating on the Internet.
The FCC didn't mandate any one anti-file-sharing scheme and instead invited companies to submit their own proposals, which brings us to TiVo's vaguely Soviet predicament. Among the schemes a handful of firms have proposed, only TiVo's would allow tightly controlled online transfers of recorded programs.
For this, the company has drawn the ire of the National Football League and the Motion Picture Association of America, which have asked the FCC to deny TiVo's proposal.
The NFL says that TiVo's Internet-sharing feature will allow people to send game broadcasts to blacked-out viewers in real time (a team's home game can be aired locally only if it sells out beforehand).
"It's a question of pure ability to sell tickets," said Frank Hawkins, the NFL's senior vice president for business affairs. "Buffalo typically sells out September and October, but they've got an open-air stadium. They'll never sell out those December games if they are unable to enforce the blackout rule."
This is an important point: The NFL is not asking the FCC to protect its television business -- never mind that the flag exists only to stop indiscriminate file sharing, not cure every copyright-infringement issue.
No, the NFL is asking for help with a stadium business, one that already benefits from massive government welfare. (A December 2002 Buffalo News story calculated that the taxpayers of Erie County, N.Y., had anted up about $148 million for the Bills and their stadium over the previous decade.)
In other words, the league is asking manufacturers and viewers to further subsidize team owners who are already gorging themselves at the public trough.
There's also the slight problem that the NFL's nightmare -- blacked-out viewers watching a game live on the Internet -- is all but impossible. With almost every broadband connection available today, it would take hours to upload a game. A recipient would be lucky to finish watching a Sunday afternoon game before Monday, and sending a high-definition copy would take most of the week.
Jim Burger, a lawyer for TiVo, fumed about the NFL's complaint: "Maybe their engineers understand how to inflate a football, but I don't think they understand encoded, encrypted MPEG-2," TiVo's tightly secured format.
Whenever full-quality, real-time video on the Internet does become commonplace, I expect to see the NFL capitalizing on it instead of complaining, just as it has profited from such earlier advances as satellite TV.
The MPAA, meanwhile, says that the way TiVo would allow customers to share recordings online with people who may not be friends or family members amounts to indiscriminate redistribution.
The Washington-based group wants TiVo to impose an "affinity requirement," said Fritz Attaway, its executive vice president for government relations.
But how can TiVo tell if the people to whom you've sent a program are really friends and family without launching its own Total Information Awareness program? Attaway called that "a good question." U