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It's Not TV, It's MythTV
ChipGuy writes "The New York Times looks at MythTV (an open source PVR technology), Bit Torrent and Videora and how they are disrupting the television business, especially the lucrative business of selling TV DVDs. Unlike the music industry, television folks are trying to get ahead of the curve and offer TV downloads in a legal and easy to use manner."
An entertainment industry which realizes that if it treats it own customers like criminals, they won't exactly be creating good will...
The reason TV ratings are plummetting is because TV is full of idiotic shows that make women look perfect and men look like a bunch of retards. If TV people want their ratings to improve maybe they should consider making some shows that dont suck ass.
There are differences between Music and Telivision industry. You watch a TV show only once (or a few times), while you listen to a song many times.
Not surprisingly, the repercussions - particularly the rapidly growing number of shows available for the plucking online - terrify industry executives, who remember only too well what Napster and other file-sharing programs did to the music industry. They fret that if unchecked, rampant trading of files will threaten the riches of the relatively new and surprisingly lucrative television DVD business. It could endanger sales of television shows to international markets and into syndication.
Then why don't they fucking sell their shit online in a convenient, reliable format? Or don't they want to learn from the music industry, instead ignoring the solutions and only imagining the problems?
And it could further endanger what for the past 50 years has been television's economic linchpin: the 30-second commercial.
That *particular* business model is dying, and legislation should not protect it, just as "horseless carriages" shouldn't be required to carry horse whips to keep horse whip manufacturers in business. Note I didn't say *advertizing* or commercialism is dying, because it isn't. Merchants have managed to get information about their products to people, and subsequently have them purchased, over the years and through changing technology. Tomorrow will be no different. It's just that the volume of revenue from "forced" advertising, supporting $1M/show paychecks for actors, might not still be there.
And what a tragedy that would be...
From TFA:
Mr. Poltrack of CBS said that according to his network's research, a large number of viewers would welcome the chance to pay $1 to watch each television show, if they could do it on their own schedule and with the ability to skip commercials. With commercials, they'd be willing to pay 50 cents. And because the average viewer sees only half of a show's episodes, he said, this on-demand viewing won't hurt the regular showing.
Hey, somebody's on the right track! I pay $1 for a commercial/DRM/BS-free copy of insert-name-of-TV-show-here and I can do what I want with it. $0.50 wouldn't be bad at all with commercials, either. If the quality didn't suck, and I could watch it an unlimited number of times, that'd be perfect. The only thing I wouldn't ask to be able to do would be to share it with the world, but I should be able to at least burn it to a CD/DVD and whatever else I should normally be able to do within fair use.
But will it ever happen?
How is BT slow and obnoxious? Perhaps you're confusing the screwed up message board sites with the actual protocol.
BitTorrent=Free. Slow and obnoxious, but free.
TV Downloads official=Not free.
But if Offical downloads are fast and less obnoxious and easily available to everyone regardless of where in the world they live, then the TCD (Total cost of downloading) for Offical downloads approaches and perhaps even beats unoffical downloads.
At that point, the only people who will still download all their TV shows illegally are those who either can't afford the legal option or object to paying to watch TV that they want to see, for whatever twisted reasons they want to come up with.
Its encouraging to see at least one US 'industry' actually take note of what does and does not work when trying to deal with the internet.
If this is done right, and priced right then i can see it becoming a success - especially if you arent forced to wait a week for each episode to come out just so TV networks can show it first. ( laiden with ads ).
Of course since you are getting it direct from the supplier, theres no need for adverts in it either - so if they`re gone, then yes i can see this becoming successful.
Ofc they`re going to have to DRM , or otherwise watermark it in some way to slow down the spread of the files to p2p networks ( its impossible to stop it really ) but as long as its all done in a nice way - i cant imagine there being much of a problem in it being adopted readily
"It could endanger sales of television shows to international markets and into syndication."
Region encoding sucks. Downloaded shows don't suffer from stupid region encoding. I see syndicated shows that also have DVD box sets, so where's the issue there? The DVDs still sell.
"from video-on-demand offerings that could let viewers order up an episode of "CSI" any time they like to a device that allows viewers who tune into the middle of a live TV broadcast to restart the program instantly"
Comcast has ads for that all over this area but I don't know of one single person that actually has the VOD feature available to them, and isn't it more costly as well? You have to have digital cable (iirc) which can run your cable bill well over $100/mo (more if you have a cable modem too) - that's a lot of dough.
Are the VOD shows commercial free, too? That would be nice to know..
Of course they're going to blame the PVR as well. There are a few things that media execs seem to overlook:
* People are SICK AND TIRED of advertising.
* People have busy schedules and would LIKE to watch TV shows, but cannot always watch them right when they're aired. Hence, the popularity of DVR units.
(I'm not even going to get into the "but you don't have a right to steal the content" crap, because I sure as hell don't think that downloading a TV show is "stealing content" when my Tivo does the exact same thing.)
And last but not least, the "Broadcast Flag" is going to be a total and complete failure.. just like the "V-Chip."
This is the important point. Available to everyone in the world at the same time. If it's a choice between getting a TV show via BitTorrent now, or watching it on TV (or via a legal download service) next year, guess which one people are going to choose? I would be more than happy to pay directly for the TV shows I watch (very few at the moment) for the convenience watching them when I choose, for not being forced to watch adverts, and for the pleasure of knowing that the money was going to those who made TV shows I want to watch, and none of it was going to reality TV producers.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I think more because of a natural human tendency to polaraize, exaggerate and simplify than because this is the true situation, the worlds of "pro-" and "anti-" when it comes to this sort of thing are often drawn as two completely incompatible world views, no overlap, nothin'. Either you're an Evil Pirate (arr!) in the eyes of the benevolent and morally impregnable Copyright Holders, or a regressive Copyright Tyrant in the eyes of the Splendid Kids.
Instead, there's a much finer gradation in the real world. I have some music that I've found on the net (most of it in almost certain violation of copyright, but most of it music either not widely available, such as small-run remixes or out-of-print recordings), and I've watched some episodes of TV shows like the Simpsons that my dad's taped over the years. (Before I bought him a boxed set of a couple of seasons, that is.) Some of it's pretty ambiguous -- some laws are a hindrance to perfectly reasonable day-to-day actions, and the law is of necessity always playing catch-up. (And I wouldn't want it *not* to be playing catch-up; the alternative is far scarier.) For instance, I like to listen to old radio shows; many of them are now in the public domain, some of them are of ambiguous copyright, and usually listed (I think quite sincerely) on the websites of collectors with earnest invitations to report if a particular episode thought free and clear is not. I've never been able to work up much moral indignation with myself for listening to widely available audio material that I'd never otherwise encounter.
(And moderate, curious downloading, no matter what the copyright issues, seems qualitatively different to me than proudly downloading current popular music by the bucketload just to fill up Ye Olde iPodde, to "stick it to the Man" or whatever. High-end grocery stores I've been in don't mind customers sampling a grape or two; they know it increases sales either directly or through generated goodwill. That doesn't mean that carting out a case of oranges is the same thing. There are slipper slopes going both ways, I realize, but there are some slippery slopes worth venturing around the upper stretches of, or something.)
Appropriate moderation also applies to the whole concept of copyright. I'm not opposed to copyright (in fact, as societal constructs go, I think it's high on the Good list), but [even / especially] as a rabid free marketeer, I know that copyright is an extended rather than a natural right; the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, by contrast, are inalienable. Copyright is different -- it's a societal convention codified in law, to grant certain privileges (temporary monopoly) in exchange for certain later transfers (into the public domain). It shouldn't mean people can't remember and repeat lyrics, and (let me whack an obvious mole), it shouldn't mean that superficial cultural aspects like the words to Happy Birthday are forever off limits to TV characters. Copyright law is perhaps not as broken as patent law, but it needs some overhauling. Specifically, I'd like to see the temporary monopoly bit be clarified as applying specifically to wide-scale copying likely to affect commerical endeavors of the copyright holder. This still leaves messy edges, but ones I think easier to deal with the current system's mess.
With TV, back to the Simpsons box set: I'd not see much moral problem with anything I do (record, re-watch, commerical skip, dub with voices of my relatives, use as the inspiration for a novel) with television shows unless I've explicitly and with full knowledge promised not to do those things. But for certain shows (glad to see Northern Exposure's box sets, and Monk's) I'd *like* to get liner notes, extra features, snippets, outtakes, etc, and paying for them seems fair. [On the other hand, when DVDs are available from the library, is there moral harm in recording them for later watching, before handing them back to the library? For private, non-commerical use, is the maker actually likely to lose revenue fr
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
can't afford the legal option
Since this demographic cannot afford the legal option, they never were a possible customer.
Obviously, you can't claim a loss to someone who can't afford your product*, but I'm betting the distributors will anyway.
*That is unless it is an item that decreases the amount of items that can be sold to other customers. Since downloads are limitless, it applies here.
Unfortunately probably not an affordable one. Have you priced TV DVDs lately? Something like Law and Order is like... 40 bucks a season or something.
I dunno, I'd call that affordable. That's probably a couple bucks an episode, max? And without commercials, and possibly with extra features (some of which people may not want, *shrug*).
If there was a way to legally download all the fresh shows that I want to see, I'd pay a few bucks per episode. But that isn't going to happen because of market segmentation politics. See, I live in Germany, where shows only come up on TV a few years after they aired in the States, which really sucks.
By downloading them off the net, I can get them now, without the sucky translation - but it's also illegal. It's lose-lose all the way. I have given up hope of enjoying the shows just like a normal viewer in the USA can, long ago. DRM is going to make us pay very thoroughly. And by paying I don't only mean money but also the freedom to choose content you want in a format you want.
Despite all this stuff like MythTV, thinks aren't exactly looking so bright on the consumer front.
1. I'm not advocating stealing the content, copyright infringement, or anything along those lines, so your entire post and the locking doors analogy is invalid.
2. Well, why *don't* they move into a new medium? Or are you saying they should have just stuck with OTA delivery, instead of cable and satellite? Or maybe VHS? Or perhaps film? Or maybe hand-drawn flipbooks? The internet and various media formats are just another delivery mechanism which they should be JUMPING at, AND making a lot of money doing, to boot! This isn't about anyone stealing, this is about content providers responding to the marketplace.
Sure, but don't you expect at some point the Media Powers That Be will divulge their ultimate plan, when the ask US Congress to approve certain requirements for recording Television and effectively criminalize unapproved PVRs (those which don't erase stuff after so much time, those that don't automatically include some sort of DRM to prevent you burning DVDs of shows to give to your friends, etc.)?
it'll move underground and be known as MythterTV
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Teachers are almost infinitely more useful than actors. But I pay lot more for tuition than going to the movies. Now, if we had superstar teachers whose lectures were all over the media and people paid to watch, they'd be millionaires too. I'm sure there are at least a few making good money doing lecture tours already.
English is easier said than done.
It's perfectly legeal in the USA to buy a cable descrambler. You can't use it to access content you don't have the legal right to access already (like HBO, if you aren't paying for HBO) but it's been legeal for many years.
I've had folks ask what legitimate use anyone could possibly have for a cable descrambler -- I've had one for a few years.
My TiVo has a lifetime subscription (which is for the lifetime of the box) but the antenna connection is busted, so i can't just plug it into the cable line. I bought a cable box off eBay for $25 and use it to give me an SVideo feed into my TiVo -- problem solved. Yeah, i could pay TiVo $50 to fix my box, and be without it for 4-6 weeks. Or I could "rent" a cable box from my cable company for $5-15 a month. My solution works and is exactly the kind of situation the US Congress was thinking about when they eliminated the monopoly on cable boxes.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
There is a price to everything, including your own time.
You are writing that BT is slow and obnoxious. People have to pay for bandwidth and their own time. Few people want to spend their Sundays downloading music or TV show from weird places. They just want it quickly and painlessly.
That means not too expensive, but it can carry a price and people will still buy it.
That is "woefully inadequate to describe why millions of people steal," said Mr. Garland of Big Champagne, the online media measurement company.
Copyright infringement is not theft, but we see the industry repeat this lie repeatedly. Why, oh why, do people fall for this crap?
As well, please keep in mind that originally, copyright protected only the author and only for a limited time. In fact, most of the so called "copyrighted" material no longer even belongs to the original creator. Indeed, most of copyrighted material would now be in the public domain.
Jeez people, face facts, the overly affluent have corrupted the law and are using it to exploit you.
It simply amazes me just how many Americans love to talk about freedom and responsibility but then are silent in the obvious presence of tyranny and exploitation.
Words to men, as air to birds.
Look at what you're buying in the supermarket. Everything there is more expensive because of advertising. That money is used to pay for these television shows. People would still be buying toilet paper, cookies, and soda even if Britney Spears wasn't singing about it. However, she makes millions off it. So the whole system is horribly unbalanced when actors and "singers" are making millions by pursuading us regular folk to buy the products their pitching.
How is a n00b supposed to know how to use CVS or apt-get?
This guy sums it up for me. I've been running Bit Torrent to get the only 3 TV shows (Simpsons, Daily Show, Chappelle Show) I every watch. I would pay $1 for pulling a hi-res, color and sound corrected copy in a heart beat.
I am billdar, and I approve this message.
There is a major flaw in your resoning. You do not take into account that people who have been chossen to be Neilson informers will typically not want to be responsible for the demise of any shows that they watch. People for the most part act on logic and it isn't logical to kill off something that entertains you by downloading it ahead of the US syndycation schedual and not turn your TV to it during it's US first play.
The FCC limits, to some extent, what you can view in the U.S. I have DirecTV with the local channels. Would I pay extra to get the raw East and West coast network feeds? You bet. I live on the East coast and sometimes a heavy rainstorm will prevent reception. If I could get the West Coast feed, some things could be picked up when they're broadcast a few hours later on that stream. Same with local channels. The coverage which gives me Charlotte, NC locals also broadcasts DC. Would I pay extra for those? You bet.
The FCC won't allow it. How stupid is that? If I'm already paying for the local stations, I should be able to buy other feeds. It boils down to perceived advertising exposure.
It's not JUST the content providers, the FCC has something to do with it as well.
Now, if Discovery and the BBC would broadcast the same shows on both sides of the pond and if Canada wasn't excluded, boy, that would be nice.
They read the instructions, and then play aroud with it. Yes, there are instructions for accessing the mythTV cvs, even with full commands to type in. All two of them, if cvs is already installed in your system.
Who knows? They might even learn something and become less of a n00b.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
Ugh. I hate it when industry propaganda gets reprinted by reporters without comment or common sense. OK, let's talk about this sentence. What exactly did happen to the music industry? During the rise of P2P, their business improved. Then a recession hit, and their business slowed. They then attacked their customers, which is bad for business too. Then iTunes and the like came out, and the recession eased, and business went up.
So what exactly went wrong for the music industry?! They certainly moaned about losing business, but check out those bottom lines and you'll see they are still in business and raking in the billions, thank you very much. Bah! Bad, John Markoff! Repeating industry propaganda is not good for a reporter to be taken seriously.
I would complain about $1/ep. I record/watch about 22 shows per week (if they are all first-runs). This pricing model would wreak havoc with my budget/finances. Would you pay $88 per month? Even if the shows were in HD with no commercials and encoded with a great codec and with no DRM?
Now don't get me wrong, I would welcome being able to download TV shows for a reasonable price with the above conditions. I think the FCC should make it mandatory that OTA broadcasts be made available as soon as the episode airs and kept available until a DVD is available that contains that episode.
I also think you made a very good point regarding the accuracy of viewership. The only reason Family Guy is being brought back is due to DVD sales. Downloads and DVD sales should reflect reality far greater than Nielson rating ever could.
I think a new US law requires that in July, all HDTV recievers will be mandated to respect the "do not record" bit so that the networks can limit what you do with "their" tv stream.
Old encoders will be grandfathered in, so I just bought a pcHDTV that works with linux. http://www.pchdtv.com/
Buch of crap. HDTV has been such a mess. What, 28 different broadcast "standards"? That is not a standard. Go ask the Best Buy drone if any of their pretty flat screens support 1080i. None do, some tube sets may.
My crappy 21" CRT does 2000x1500 which is more than enough for 1080 lines of resolution.
Blah blah blah
People who copy and distribute TV shows are criminals. That's because entertainment industry has paid off the whores in Congress to make it a crime.
It is perfectly feasible to have a totally differeent business model. The industry could have adopted the model when cassette tapes came out, i.e., part of the price you pay in the tape is to reimburse the copyright holder who material you are copying. But the kicker in this article was when they mentioned that they are making a 40-50% profit margin on DVDs of TV shows. Did you miss that part?
It's like Congress keeping drug patents in place so the drug industry can make a 30% profit margin.
Or the Justice Department doing nothing about Microsofts monopolies in operating systems, so they can make a 400% profit margin in that area.
They like to say that capitalism is based on free enterprise and competition, but now days its about buying Congressmen (and women) to give you a monopoly.
"The members of the MythTV community, who now do not have to pay monthly fees to rent set-top boxes or digital video recorders, have plenty of more mischievous company in trying to outwit the television industry. Millions of viewers are now watching illegal copies of television programs"
I pay the local cable company for access to the programs I want to record with Mythtv.
All of my songs are purchased via iTunes
The simple fact is that I use mythtv as a recorder just like I would use a vcr. I do not steal any content even though the article suggests that I do.
I have 2 cable boxes (which I pay for) connected to my mythtv system. I pay the local cable company for the content I may want to record.
But they got boobies!
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
I had some disagreements with the article as well...
... terrify industry executives, who remember only too well what Napster and other file-sharing programs did to the music industry.
... are the scourge of the music industry" doesn't make it true.
... give the audience an attractive model before the illegal file-sharer providers meet their needs ...
... the industry and the government have to move - fast - to establish rules ... Otherwise, television executives say, the very creation of television programming is placed in jeopardy.
... was dangerously excessive.
Not surprisingly, the repercussions
Yeah, the RIAA kept making record profits each year, despite the recession. Why should the MPAA be afraid after such a "terrifying" example?
Saying that "the file-sharing networks
It's a bit late for that. Look at the download numbers given at the top of the article.
Television isn't in danger. The MPAA's business model is in danger. The government should not pass laws to protect an obsolete business model. If the current television mafia goes away, perhaps more shows will be created for love instead of greed. Wouldn't that be better for everyone?
Playing the same show on different screens around the house seems reasonable, said Mr. Cotton of NBC Universal. But he added that expanding the circle much beyond that
I think Mr. Cotton is missing something important here. Customers have no obligation to him, or to any television company. The issue isn't what he will allow the customers to do, but what the customers will let him get away with.
"You'll make more money and suffer far less from the black market if you simply create the opportunity to access content freely," said Mr. Garland of Big Champagne.
Tell that to the RIAA.
"Thus they do things like spend half the license fee [a tax on TV owners in favour of the BBC] on Premiership football [ie Soccer] which is a huge advert in itself."
Bear in mind that the reason why Soccer became so expensive was because of Sky outbidding everyone else in an effort to corner the market; just after the dotcom bubble burst, the prices started to fall, but not within the reach of ITV, so the BBC is essentially the only real bidding entity in what would otherwise be a fairly nasty little monoculture. Sky family pack subscribers subsidise the sports channels to the tune of 50-60%, and while I'm with you on supporting the multimillion wage cheques, it's just how things have played out. Sooner or later a change will come.
"However, they advertise their own programs"
Yeah, that's 'branding'. It's one of the things that they do to increase their viewership figures to stop the government talking about more reforms, because the government hates having an independent body that might be critical of it and they're just looking for an excuse. That was the terrible thing about the Hutton report and it's effect on Greg Dyke.
Oddly Draconis
Too cynical to live, too stubborn to die.