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Cablevision Sued Over Remote DVR Plan
zoobid writes "NBC, CBS, ABC, and Fox have joined together and filed an injunction against Cablevision over their plan to introduce remote DVRs to their customers. 'They argue that while precedent may allow for legal time-shifting among home TV viewers, Cablevision's plans should require a special license from the broadcasters.' Cablevision's plan to create a centrally-hosted DVR was previously covered here on Slashdot."
This is so close to true "tv on demand" that the networks have to be crapping their pants.
How do you justify marking up your "must see tv ads" for those crap shows that you slip between the good shows, if it can be proven that people watch the good shows on a completely different day, and don't watch the crap shows at all? If they have to flat rate, or discount their ads, that'll be a huge chunk of their profit.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Maybe one day IT companies will focus on products and services instead of legal activities.
One should wonder how much resources those companies waste in useless legal actions and how much they earn from the same.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
Don't let the networks win this one, or the battle is going to go on for years. Once it has left their antenna, they lose their control over it.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
So let me get this straight... you can use a personal DVR in your home (rented from the cable or dish provider), and record/playback/etc all you want - but to provide the same functionality as an online service is somehow different? I don't get it!
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As has been pointed out here on /. many times before, any industry whose business model relies on controlling the channels of media distribution is now dying a death from obsolescence, thanks to ubiquitous electronic distribution.
This legal move by the networks, which obviously has no customer benefit, is clearly a sign of this malady. We are now seeing more and more suits like this as companies, desperately trying to cling to a failing business model, turn to the law to prop up their house of cards. And it is their last, best hope. The government is quite likely the only organization more resistant to change than the media industries.
Although I'm not certain how much is truth and how much legend, I understand that a major hotel chain has been seeking the blessing from the top three or four television networks to "DVR" the major primetime shows and offer them to their guests on a pay-per-view basis.
So imagine arriving late to the hotel the night before to your business meeting and being able to watch 24 in your hotel room 8 hours after it ran.
At issue was getting a revenue-sharing agreement setup between the networks and the hotel. Oh, and coming up with a pricepoint that didn't rape the guests.
Although it may someday come to pass, the greedy networks are the barrier to this kind of Hotel DVR system. So it's of no surprise to me that Cablevision is being sued over essentially the same thing that the hotel chain is too afraid to implement on their own.
The surest sign of intelligent life in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us. -- Calvin & Hobbes
While it may seem like playing at semantics, I think they might have a legitimate gripe this time around.
CableVision is literally rebroadcasting their content, which is a major shift from the previous model of 'consumer records it at home'.
Currently, if you want to re-broadcast a show, you have to pay for it. If CableVision goes through with this, it'll seriously dilute the market (in CableVision areas) for re-runs.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
So there I was, with all the hardware necessary for a MythTV box. I thought, "What fun, I can record anything I want, whenever I want, and play it back on my own time". So I set down and got to work. Couple days later, I had it all hooked up to the TV.
And what do I find? There's nothing on TV to watch. I literally spent the afternoon/evening looking for something, anything to record. I still can't find anything worth the harddrive space.
So, I accepted defeat, set it up to record Dora the Explorer and Sesame street ( 2 year old daughter ), and started putting my DVD isos on the harddrive. Might as well savage some use out of it.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
This is the first time that I agree with the entertainment industry on a case like this; if the end user wants to record it, share it with friends, re-watch ot timeshift content, fine BUT this is the cable company cacheeing all content and doing mass redistribution, for profit -- thus it is a commercial enterprise using the content in a way that their license doesnt allow, pretty clear cut to me.