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High Court Allows Remote-Storage DVR System
Immutate and several other readers noted that Cablevision will be allowed to go ahead with deploying a remote-storage DVR system, when the US Supreme Court declined (without comment) to hear an appeal of a lower court ruling that went against movie studios and TV networks. (We discussed this case a few months back.) "Cable TV operators won a key legal battle against Hollywood studios and television networks on Monday as the Supreme Court declined to block a new digital video recording system that could make it even easier for viewers to bypass commercials. The justices declined to hear arguments on whether Cablevision Systems Corp.'s remote-storage DVR system would violate copyright laws. That allows the... company to proceed with plans to start deploying the technology this summer."
I don't understand why cable networks think that we need to pay for their content twice. I mean, I'm already paying for their content via the cable subscription fee so why should I even have ads? Either get rid of the licensing fees or get rid of the ads. This is like paying for a "premium" website only to get hit by pop ups on every page. I mean, I could even understand an ad or two at the start and after the end of the program, but why do they think they need to have 9 minutes of ads for every show when I'm already paying for their content?
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Yikes you mean you can record a show off of tv and watch it at a different location? Wow what an innovation... oh, wait, I used to do that with Video Tape (VHS) all the time... time shifting shows too... location shifting them is no different...
Before you know it you brain cells will have to pay a fee for SEEING a show. Oh wait, that's known as a movie theater...
Before you know it you'll have to pay a fee every time you REMEMBER a show you saw on TV. Now that's scary.
Good, my remote-storage DVR is called "The Pirate Bay." Glad that's all cleared up then.
So the content providers sue the cable company for remote caching of shows. They really won this. Now, if the show is on a server somewhere, things like ad skip can't be disabled. There's no web page of hacks and work arounds for the "cable box". While the cable company was looking at this as two million remote boxes in homes versus a server farm, the content providers, stuck in 1965 where they played and you watched when they said to, freaked. They will figure out they won this as soon as they charge 5 cents per delayed broadcast...all passed on to the viewer, of course. Oh yes, that "dvr" fee is not going away, even if the DVR does.
From the article...
Movie studios, TV networks and cable TV channels had argued that the service is more akin to video-on-demand, for which they negotiate licensing fees with cable providers.
Isn't this exactly what video-on-demand is? Downloading a movie locally that is held at the cable company's location? (DirecTV acts that way with their DVR. You have to download it). If so, the ruling may mean license fees are unneeded.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
MythTV works for me. It already eats the commercials from the recorded shows, and with simple scripts, I can encode old Star Trek shows onto my iPhone. If you haven't used it recently, I suggest taking a look. MythTV.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
On the one hand I'm hoping that with a central office based DVR solution we won't be limited by tuners to how many shows we can record - three programs on at the same time? No problem! Set a recording from one cable box and want to watch it in another room? No problem!
However, if the new central DVR service is run through their existing Pay Per View software then the user interface (at least on Comcast) is just awful. Based on how laggy the remote is with PPV I think this is also the death of channel skipping - the control is just too sloppy to do it well, and you can bet your life the content producers like it that way and it won't get fixed.
This is a very good example of fair use.
... tagged "no thigh court"? ;)
No matter which party prevailed in this case, the average citizen wouldn't win. Both parties are only interested in making money, and as much of it as they can get away with.
It is interesting that this case does not cross the line into the territory of retransmission.
Flying J manager at shift change:
Alright people, we have a real party scheduled tonight. 12 gay truckdrivers and 3 gay protitutes have reserved shower stall 16 for ten o'clock. I want the shower cleaned before eight, and locked. Mr. Emad said he will be wearing something called a "slashdot" T-shirt, and he'll be half soused. I understand that he looks like a midget gay truck driver, and possibly of mid-eastern origin, so keep an eye out for him.
Let them have fun, but GET THEIR MONEY UP FRONT!! Those peter puffers are always trying to rip us off!
No one has mentioned "Betamax decision" yet, have they?
The Betamax decision primarily dealt with timeshifting, this is space- and time-shifting, is it not?
The only issue is whether this will be harmful or not. While VCRs weren't necessarily harmful, because people kept watching TV as much as they'd normally have done, will this be harmful in any way?
Can't it be justified that as long as the commercial time is being sold at the current price rates it currently is sold at, it won't have a negative affect on sponsors?
Make commercial viewing more enjoyable. Shorter and less frequent commercial breaks. Perhaps bumps, like what Cartoon Network's Adult Swim does, which is an incentive to sit through them sometimes.
There was no constitutional issue here. Content owners can just go tell Congress to tweak copyright laws a bit and bingo! All fixed.
The Second Circuit repeatedly explained that its rejection of petitioners' public-performance claim depended on a range of factors: not only that each transmission would be sent to a single recipient, but also that (1) each transmission would be made using a unique copy of the relevant program; and (2) each transmission would be made solely to the person who had previously made that unique copy. See, e.g., Pet. App. 30a-31a, 36a, 39a, 41a.
If I read this right the cable operators are in for one hell of a bill in both storage and replication hardware to create duplicate copies for each user request. Storage is cheap, but since there are also legal (and relatively short) limits on how long you can buffer something before it counts as a copy this tends to complicate scalable data replication. Not impossible, just adds extra cost and complexity. Which no doubt will be passed on.
But by definition we're consumers and we get to vote with our dollars. If this service is a value add pay a little more. If not, don't pay for it. If you aren't given a choice (i.e. added to your bill anyway) drop cable and go Hulu, Apple, Blockbuster, Netflix, or pick your own provider. Nobody is holding a gun to your head to subscribe to cable.
The value adds I see are data integrity and (if Cablevision does this right) the ability to take my recordings with me if I move. Or preserve my recordings if my non-DVR box bites the dust, If you're attached to your content and don't want to invest in your own DVD burner or something this seems worthwhile. I'm not personally this way, but some people are freaky about their DVR content.
Nine minutes of ads would be great. That's what you got in 1969 on a one hour show.
My memory is a little fuzzy from the late 1960's and all of the 1970's, but nine minutes per hour in 1969 sounds a little bit high. :-)
I'm not looking for an argument or debate here, just if you know where to find this info, I would truly appreciate a link. Really!
My fuzzy memory is only coming up with around seven minutes per hour, but again, I readily admit my fuzzy memory may be off base here.
To be honest, the only thing I truly remember from TV of 1969 with any clarity, is the Apollo 11 moon landing:
Springfield, MO...at my maternal Grandparent's house, all of us five kids, my Grandparents, and Mom and Dad sitting in the den focused on the B&W 19" Quasar(tm) TV, as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin approached the landing site and touched down. Then after some discourse between the Moon and Earth, Neil stepped out on the Moon and bounced around.
I was enraptured....multiple geekasms!!!
Then Walter Cronkite* broke the spell, and told us what we had just seen...just in case we did not get it the first time, 'live'.
Geekasms cease, and my pocket protector slid back down into the confines of my pocket....sigh
Unfortunately**, I can remember TV and commercials farther back than 1969, and the ratio of adverts to programming has increased exponentially.
I can rember half-hour shows being preceded with "a word from our sponsors', then a 45 second to 60 second ad, then the program would play 29 minutes...uninterrupted....rinse, and repeat.
Then it went to 30-45 second ad's, every '15' minutes....then 2 minutes every 10 minutes....then 2-3 minutes every 5 minutes.
I gave up on TV two months after getting my(then only available retail for 3 months...w00t!!!) ATI All In Wonder Radeon 7500, 64 MB's VRAM, 8x AGP, video/capture card.
After two months of 'playing' and 'familiarization', I set up to record "Trippin' the Rift"
I recorded 3 episodes, pausing REC at ad break, then resume REC at end of ad break.
3 'half hour' episodes should be 90 minutes.
The average for the three shows ended up being:(hours:minutes:seconds)
18:42= programming, 11:58 advert's.
I quit watching TV then, but the ATI card helped me use 'medium' graphics settings in Battlefield 1942!!!!(IT WAS A p3 800 MHz, 512 MB PC 133 DRAM PC)
By 2039, the show will be 9 minutes long and you'll have 51 minutes of ads. And fast-forward will be illegal.
Hear! Hear! ;-)
That's only assuming that the RIAA/MPAA chip is not required to be implanted at birth, you brave fool!
I'm probably preaching to the choir here, so I shall depart. [puts on Wizard hat and cape...enacts arcane rituals, then departs in a puff of smoke]
Cough! Cough!
*looks around: new basement.... Sweet!...new Dungeon!*
* Walter Cronkite was very trusted, and had much 'media influence'.
[disclaimer] I also readily drank Walter's koolaide without question, nor regret that to this day.
**Tongue_in_cheek...I am old enough to realise that I probably won't see all of the amazing things we will achieve, but I am truly grateful for what I have seen!!!\
It's a positive thing!...Like 'Johnny 5'...need more input!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
No, they did not allow it. Nor did they disallow it. They declined to hear the case. In all but a few situations, the Supreme Court has discretionary jurisdiction, and can decline to hear a case for a variety of reasons. Sometimes they want to wait until multiple circuits have considered an issue. Sometimes they think the time is ripe for the Court to settle an issue, but the particular case up for review is not a good vehicle for that review, and so waits for a better case. Sometimes they just don't think the case is important enough compared to the other cases competing for their time.
Cable companies will have DVR farms, one for each channel, sucking up every show, every day, and making, say, the last 24-48 hours of shows available for free, in case you miss a show, but after hearing about it at work/school, you want to watch it. In addition to the default 24-48 hour retention, subscribers will also be able to submit requests for certain shows, and those requested shows will be retained until there is no more interest. The cable company could also update the commercials in their "slots" in each show, to be more current (a show from last month could have commercials currently running instead of historical ones), increasing revenues. If I worked at a Cable Company, I'd have my super-duper 200 channel DVR farm ready to go for this effort.
It wouldn't bee that big a complex, really, retaining two days of shows for a channel is what, about 50 Gig at "best quality"? From there, 90% of the shows immediately fall off the servers for lack of interest I suspect, and 1% may live on for more than 30 days (hit shows, TV movies, specials, etc.). This is the textbook example of the "Long Tail" economy.
I wouldn't charge for the service, I'd offer it as a differentiator and try and use it to increase adoption rates along existing cable runs, improving revenue per passed house.
Ken
Skipping commercials is NOT the only reason to use a DVR. While that may be a great feature, for my family, it's secondary to time-shifting and an integrated, searchable on-screen program guide. Being able to find the shows we want to watch, record them, and watch them in any order when WE want to really is the key to good DVRs.
I've been using DVRs since mid 1999 when the first ReplayTV boxes came out. Since then, I've used ReplayTV DVRs, a Charter Cable DVR, a MOXI HD DVR, a SageTV PC-based DVR, and now a Dish Network HD DVR. And over the years, we have discovered that commercial skipping, while nice, really isn't that important to us as some of the other DVR features.
For example, we actually found that eliminating commercials completely was really NOT the most desirable. With the aid of some nice add-ons to our SageTV box, we had the ability to completely eliminate virtually all commercials from recorded content. We would be watching a recording of say, "Star Trek: The Next Generation", and when a commercial break would begin, SageTV would automagically skip over the commercials resuming the show. It was seamless and very accurate. The problem was that over time, we discovered that we had become WAY out of touch with things like what new shows or specials were coming up, what movies were at or coming to the theater, what local news alerts were going on, and yes, even missing out on some legitimately good commercials. Our Dish Network DVR has no commercial elimination, just a forward-skip button, so while we do continue to skip many ciommercials, we don't eliminate them completely.
So commercial skipping really is not the core reason for us to continue to use a DVR.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
...that CATV wasn't really a rebroadcast and that fees did not have to be paid.
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=392&invol=390
"High Court Allows"
What bullshit. Denial of certiorari by the Supreme Court expresses literally zero opinion about the merits of the case. This is another example of the MSM getting Supreme Court procedure wrong. I've seen this "victory" touted elsewhere. It's not a victory except inasmuch as those claiming victory were assured a loss if the Supreme Court granted cert.
It would be a victory of SCOTUS issued cert and then issued a per curiam opinion affirming the COA decision. That did not happen, and thus the petitioners are (unless I misunderstand the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure) free to repetition for certiorari next term.
That being said, having read the opinion and cited its reasoning extensively in a law review article I just authored (and will soon be shopping around for publication), I think J. Walker's reasoning was dead-on accurate, particularly on the issue of what "public" means in "public performance."
If you record it with MythTV and play it back when you want and it automagically skips all the commercials you get to see what you want, when you want.
How does it know what's a commercial and what isn't? Would it detect a product-placement-fest film such as The Wizard for what it is, a 90-minute commercial for the Nintendo Entertainment System?
What you've proposed is market-based capitalism. In the USA, we killed that when we elected Reagan, and Obama isn't going to bring it back (for a while it looked like he might, but then he got elected and saw how great it actually is to be fuehrer).
You need a time machine. What makes money today is bribing politicians to strengthen monopolies or to reduce your labor and material costs, not providing better service and outcompeting other entrepreneurs.