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Watching My Neighbors Watch On-Demand TV
Josh Levin, Slate Magazine writes "I have a magical box that allows me to watch other people watch TV — their movies, their sports, their cartoons, and their hour-long procedural dramas. And sometimes, usually around 11:30 on Friday nights, their soft-core pornography... I solved the mystery by consulting online message boards. At techie sites like AVS Forum, other voyeurs described their adventures in freeloading. I was intercepting video-on-demand channels through the power of my Samsung's QAM tuner."
I have the same thing going on with my TV. At first you think, "Wow! Free VOD!" but then you realize you have no clue when a show starts, no way to unpause if the real viewer gets a phone call or goes to the bathroom, and well... it's pointless. You end up flipping through a good 50 channels for hours having literally no clue what shows are on and no clue if that person will finish them.
It sounds neat but it's rather boring and partially stinks since you have to manually program those channels out. I mentioned this happening when the cable guy stopped buy and he seemed pretty "meh" about it.
Why does it need to be encrypted? he has no control over the show, the fast forwarding, the changing of channels. Pretty difficult way to watch TV.
Plus it's not like you know WHO is watching it.
Encrypting it costs them money, and doesn't give anybody any gain.
He is not circumventing a protection, and I would be very interested to read the opinion of any lawyer who feels this is a violation of the DMCA.
Yesh, there are a lot of stupid clients the tell their lawyers to send out notices, but they never seem to go anywhere.
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