Classic TV for Free Download

way2trivial writes to tell us the New York Times is reporting that Warner Brothers will have over 100 classic TV shows available for free download with a 1-2 minutes of commercials per episode. From the article: "There is a catch. To use the technology, viewers will have to agree to participate in a special file-sharing network. This approach helps AOL reduce the cost of distributing-high quality video files by passing portions of the video files from one user's computer to another. AOL says that since it will control the network, it can protect users from the sorts of viruses and spyware that infect other peer-to-peer systems."

Comments

Free but more details needed

[dada21]

This is great news for AOL. WB is one of the last "analog" networks continually mixing hit and past programming, with a huge license to decent past programming. The lady and I don't watch the news media much, but when we do it's strictly for WGN's morning comedy newscrew. (Sidenote: WGN is the Chicago's WB and has consistently been top notch is broadcast technical superiority. The station engineers answer the phones and have helped get us quality HD reception for years.)

We always joke about Welcome Back, Kotter and I'll be the first one downloading the shows. I'll get an MCE-plug-in to do it for me. The Fugitive is a great call by Frankel's team as well.

CBS and NBC's use of Comcast and DirectTV is outdated. Why use a very limited platform that they pay for when you can use your customers' paid for bandwidth and force them to share between each other? Throw in advertising for Smallville and Sex and the City, track download/share stats, Profit!!!

Babylon 5, Wonder Woman and Chico and the Man? Great ideas. Limited time access (via DRM?) is reasonable as I can see people buying the box sets if they like the shows enough. Here's to the WB to proving it once and for all. Frankel is really risking a lot, but I'm guessing the risk is worth the possible reward. The next generation will decide if this will work.

I'm not familiar with Kontiki or AOL Hi-Q. Hopefully it won't be too burdened by adware, Sony-style rootkits, or excessive tracking beyond what and when. We'll see, right?

One feature, to accompany "Welcome Back, Kotter," will allow users to upload a picture of themselves (or a friend) and superimpose 1970's hair styles and fashion, and send the pictures by e-mail to friends or use as icons on AOL's instant-message system.

Good idea. Use AIM as a pathway as well.

AOL may not be the idiot I previously mentioned recently. I'll be the first to admit it if they balance the good with the bad.

One thing I'd LOVE to see:

Ads separate from content with content flagged for an ad to be displayed. A user could give their Zip+4, Zip, Area Code or Metropolis (picking how specific they want to be) and more area targeted ads could be displayed. Here's where Google VidWords (VidAds?) would excel, actually.

Finally, WB-AOL needs an "Internet Extender." IP based set-top box that connects to your TV. Or a USB2TV box locked to their content? Watching on your PC is a step. Watching on your TV would be a lock.

Re:Free but more details needed

[dada21]

Right, very light on details.

As the content is being provided "freely," I think it is up to the publishers and the advertisers to decide who can see it and for how long. The #1 complaint from CD and DVD owners is "I bought the xD!!! I should use it as I please!" and this completely destroys that complaint (which is why I've never said the above).

For now, the content owners are doing the most free market thing they can -- don't sell the content to the viewer (but to the advertiser), and control exactly who can view it and when. There is no physical medium exchanging hands, so the licensing of the programming is truly controlled (until a hack is found).

This may not be what the /. crowd wants, but it is more in the direction of what the average viewer wants. In the long run, this really could be a win/win/win situation, depending on how well the advertisers recoup their money spent.

Proprietary or No?

[Vorondil28]

Is this just a flavor of BitTorrent, or did they develop it in-house?

I'll throw out the first questions

[voice_of_all_reason]

Proprietary file format? (can't edit out commercials in Virtualdub)
What encoding?
Special player required?
Quality?
Do you have to be an AOL member?

Re:I'll throw out the first questions

[pinkocommie]

In principle i agree but shouldnt that content be already paid for many times over. From the original copyright duration, all programming prior to 1998 /1991 (duration dependant) should've been free/public domain :)

Re:I'll throw out the first questions

[networkBoy]

Who's going to pay for the delivery bandwith then?
I realise it's using P2P to ease distrobution (but is is not _eliminating_ it)
Basically that's what the ads are paying for. That's why there are only 2 mins of ads not 8.
Don't like it? Tough, it's their content.

As to the GP post about video production, he's spot on. I did a three minute "informertial" for UC Davis (for my wife's class). I sent her group out to do all the video taping, scripting, etc. All I did was post production work: editing, and mastering to DVD. The prof set a hard limit of 3 min and I came in at 2:59.25 (2min, 59sec, 25frames).
My wife and her group told the prof in advance that they had someone else do the editing, as the on-campus media center had great gear with absolutly _no_ support. Since no one in the group knew the tools they were dead in the water, thus I did it on my video editing PC. That three min video took 10 hours to edit, sequence, and assemble (plus a few intermediate renders). I'm not a pro, but I can tell you that a pro would still take quite a while.
-nB

Re:I'll throw out the first questions

[Zathrus]

You make valid points, but the question remains -- what's the file format?

I don't care so much about editing out the commercials, but the fact of the matter is that if I can't watch it on my TV in a reasonable manner then this is of absolutely no use to me.

And the only way to make it watchable on TV in a reasonable manner is to provide it in MPEG-2 format, or something that can be easily transcoded to that -- then you can burn it to DVD and watch it on any DVD player (or, in my case, stick it on my server and transfer it to a TiVo to watch).

Heck, if you provide all the stuff necessary to burn a DVD easily then you can make the commercials non-skippable, at least for most users who won't take the time to figure out how to edit the control files/content to change that.

Re:I'll throw out the first questions

[jschottm]

why do media companys publish so much bullsh!t content?

A number of reasons. Some of it is because people have different tastes. Most forms of media out the have had a number of people that thought it was worth spending money on making. There's a small amount of stuff that's generated just as a tax writeoff, but mostly it's a combination of bad judgement and the fickleness of the public. You basically create a bunch of stuff that you think is good, throw it out to the public, market it, and see what becomes popular. No one could have predicted the ubiquitous coverage that "Standing outside a broken phonebooth with money in my hand" received. You make a bunch of stuff like that and put it out. If you do it right, you make enough money to cover all of the experements, reward the ones that did well, and stay in business as a company.

Related to that is the fact that influential people will sometimes latch onto a bad project for whatever reason and push it forward. Hence why things like Battlefield Earth get made - a big enough person wants it to happen and the studios decide that placating that person is worth it. If Tom Cruise wants something to happen, it will, because the public will go see things that Tom Cruise is in.

Another part of it is that lowbrow tends to sell well. Insert the usual comments on Bread & Circus, no one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American Public, and so on. Horrible sitcoms and reality shows not only attract a larger audience than, say, Firefly, but attracts an audience less likely to Tivo/download shows.

If they cut some 60% of the crap that is out there, they could save billions.

Perhaps. I have thousands of CDs, the vast majority of them are far from the mainstream, and a good chunk of them are prolly things that you'd describe as crap. People have different tastes.

Re:I'll throw out the first questions

[LWATCDR]

I feel the key is to use old commercials. If the show is from the 70s use 70's style commercials. People might not even edit them out if they could. I am sure that somebody will break the DRM at some point in time.

Why not bittorrent?

[91degrees]

The NYTimes isn't letting me access it so I don't know what they're using, but I'd have thought a torrent would work perfectly for this, and the fact that they control the seed will mean that they can still have control over the network.

Oh Come on! make up your mind already.

[xtracto]

There is a catch. To use the technology, viewers will have to agree to participate in a special file-sharing network.

Why precisely is this a catch? why is it something bad? isnt this somethig we have been looking for since I dont know when?

For me it is not a catch, it is the technology that allows WB to broadcast these videos on internet.

I only think about the advertisments, I guess we will only get Coca/Pepsi-cola and Microsoft adverts, since these adverts must be for a really wide audience (i.e. the whole world)

Re:Oh Come on! make up your mind already.

[jandrese]

The catch is that a large number of users will be in violation of their ISP's TOS if they subscribe to this service. Peer to Peer programs almost always run afoul of the "no servers" rule that nearly every ISP puts in the TOS for their "home" packages. In some TOSes they can terminate your account (with no refund) for simply responding to a ping.

Of course almost no ISPs enforce their TOS agreements, but they are legally binding and you are in violation of contract when you do stuff like this.

Re:Oh Come on! make up your mind already.

[ikegami]

MSN clients, ICQ clients, FTP clients (in active mode) and many more clients create server sockets. I'm not sure that makes them servers. The language of the TOS of these ISPs is outdated. If the problem is excessive use of upload bandwidth, the TOS should talk about this, not servers.

Re:win/win/win

[budgenator]

it whittles away at the filesharing == evil stigma

Kontiki 5.0 Leading the Evolution in Digital Media Delivery
Content protection
  Content cannot be copied or shared illegally from one device to another
  A centrally managed publishing process allowing only authorized parties publish content to the system
Rapid content delivery
  Creates a compelling internet based offering for the consumer with a superior end user experience through DVD quality video delivery
  Can deliver content from one client behind a firewall to another

Sorry I just don't see how a commercial rip-off of bittorrent style technology, with some DRM shoe-horned in (probably very lame weak, encryption) is going to make file-sharing anymore respectable.

Users on Macintosh and Unix workstations can retrieve Kontiki-powered content using standard http download via their browser. Some security features may not be available to these users.

I read that as if your on a Mac, Linux or solaris machine your just shit- outa-luck, and if you think your going to download a program from you desktop to your laptop to watch later, your SOL also!

PC Specs

[macemoneta]

From the kontiki site follow. Looks like no Mac or Linux:

System Requirements:

(These are the minimum system requirements. Better performance will be seen on more powerful systems.)

        * Pentium II 400Mhz (or faster recommended for optimal video playback)
        * 64MB of RAM
        * 2GB hard drive with 500MB of free space
        * Windows 98, ME, NT4, 2000, or XP
        * Internet Explorer 5.01 SP2 (or later), Netscape 4.7 or AOL 6.0 (or later)
        * Windows Media Player 7, RealPlayer and Quicktime are recommended for the best experience
        * A 56Kbps (or faster) Internet connection

Additional Requirements for using Secure Media and Document Control Features:

        * Windows Media Player 7 or later for accessing files encrypted using Windows Media Rights Manager
        * Adobe Acrobat Reader 5.0 or later for accessing secure PDF documents

ironic

[tacocat]

First they say that P2P networks are pure Evil.

Now they want to set up their own P2P network.

Wouldn't it be a hell of a lot simpler if they just set up P2P servers with the shows set up with commercials and let everyone use the existing P2P networks rather than reinventing the existing technology?

I recognize they need to generate revenue via pumping advertisements into the shows, but you would think they could come up with a better business model. I suspect that the only reason they are requiring use of their own network is so that they can track who downloads what for the marketing demographics and charge back to the advertisement firms.

So I guess my first concern with this is the matter of privacy on their P2P network. I'm suspicious that they will be using this network a little differently than what people have seen in the past.

Check out DTVmac.com

[Anonymous Coward]

In a related vein, DTV is doing some great things. It's a video content aggregation application for the internet that anyone can make a channel and appear on. Granted, mostly right now it's just homemade vids & podcast type videos, but creating an application like this where all channels & networks can post thier vids to would be great for the consumers.

Re:required clients are blocking true integration

[dublin]

I honestly think that distribution of video media over computers will be hamstrung until providers consider how the way they make their media available will work with a Home Entertainment Center PC.

No, the PC will never be it - people watch TVs because watching PCs sucks pond water.

Pay attention to what this enables, though, even if it's not in the announcement: There is nothing about the technologies decscribed that would prevent downloading them as new features for a Tivo unit connected to an Ethernet. Tivo's been trying madly to get me to plug mine into the net, offering useless and entirely uncompelling freebies like the "home media option". If I could access decent programming through my Tivo, though (so it's on my TV, not my computer, where I have never, ever, watched a movie), that might convince me both to hook the Tivo to the net as well as consider keeping Tivo's ridiculously priced service. $15/mo for a guide is a ripoff, but if they were to throw in the ability to download and watch whatever I want from a reasonably large library of decent quality shows, they've dramtically increased the desirability of Tivo's service.

Note that when presented this way, this is an very interesting and much more practical hybrid between traditional Tivo wishlist recording and true VoD systems, and one that has a preexisting very large viewer base just waiting for the right software upgrade for thier Tivo boxes. This service, like all broadcast services, wants eyballs - and Tivo can deliver them - without a PC and the tech hassles that would otherwise limit the audience to propellerheads.

Interestingly, this effectively makes WB's archive yet another cable channel (although with somewhat different flexibility, since there's no "live" feed), but one that does not have to pay for transponder space, or deal with the MSOs. AOL could easily springboard this into hundreds of similar "channels", somce of which would even be mirrors (as in archive mirrors!) of existing channels. Miss that cool "Dogfights" special on the History Channel the other night? Maybe you just discovered a cool new series and want to "catch up" on the old episodes? No problem - just tell the Tivo to download them from the archive and you've got a week or two to watch them before they automatically vanish. This really could change TV viewing forever - it's almost as good as real VoD, but isn't locked into clunky cable networks - AOL and DirecTV could clean up with this sort of thing in a DirecTivo-NG. Just don't let AMC put seventy-five commercial breaks into a movie using only three commercials, and it'll work fine...