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Fox Sues Dish Over "Auto Hop" Ad-Skipping Feature
therealobsideus writes "Dish recently announced Auto Hop, giving its customers with the Hopper DVR the ability to 'hop' past commercial break on recordings. In response, Fox has filed suit against Dish in U.S. District Court, seeking to block the technology." The L.A. Times has coverage, too. Fox claims that giving viewers the ability to skip commercials on recorded television shows demonstrates the "clear goal of violating copyrights and destroying the fundamental underpinnings of the broadcast television ecosystem."
Commercials are mandatory! Any attempt to not view them will result in a law suite!
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
The spirit of the laws? Yeah, probably, but I'm just not sure what exactly they're doing that's actually illegal. The user decides whether they want to use the feature, so no one is forcing this upon them.
Whoever didn't see this coming.... can I have your job?
That said... "clear goal of violating copyrights and destroying the fundamental underpinnings of the broadcast television ecosystem." *facepalm* The Internet is SUPPOSED to destroy ecosystems built on artificial scarcity. Free markets and black swans are a bitch, aren't they?
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
pfffffttttt I somehow for some strange reason do not think that skipping over commercials is considered violating copyrights, sounds like Fox is just mad that they can't milk the consumers for more cash (As if anyone watches commercials these days anyways...).
Fox has filed suit against all electronics manufacturers that have installed a fast-forward function on digital media playing device. Audio cassette manufacturers must remove fast-forward and rewind capabilities because users could skip a recorded radio broadcast commercial by flipping the tape, rewinding, then flipping the tape again.
Good! Let's tear down that century-old ecosystem, including the business models of those leeches. They're dying anyway. Let's start over from scratch and figure out how we can do it again, this time in ways that don't require stunting technological innovation.
blah blah blah ... social contracts ... blah blah blah ... violating copyright ... blah blah blah
Cry me a river. If they stopped violating the spirit of the rules that were meant to keep a certain amount of content in a given unit of time for a show by calling their ads for their other shows on the their networks content instead of ads, I might not be so upset. Right now there are so many ads that it seems like we get only fifteen minutes of actual programming in a half-hour show. If they will require the ads, I will simply cut back even further on my TV watching.
As for copyright, I don't see any copyright issue. The user is choosing to ignore the portion they do not wish to see, if the commercials are even considered part of the same program by copyright. Which, last I thought, were not.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Browsers that getted sued for having ad blocking features.
Not watching commercials is NOT violation of copyright.
Fuck you Fox. The only show you have is Family Guy, and that is going downhill fast.
So the format of a TV show, split up with ads interlaced between, is copyrighted? Yea, not seeing it. Guessing web based shows, with 30 second ads stuck in them, would also violate that? Not seeing anyone see over that, since I've seen it on websites that I know Fox doesn't own. Not broadcast, right? So why is broadcast special, other than it's unidirectional?
They may have an argument about network contracts, depending on if ads have any play in that, however, a copyright claim? GTFO!
Like all the other attempts to stop technological progress with lawsuits. If they rally manage to squash this one instance, people will just go back to downloading clean recordings again.
Maybe, just maybe, they will learn that they can offer clean recordings themselves, reasonably priced, DRM-free, immediately after broadcast and worldwide. The only way to survive against filesharing is to have a better offering first. Well, some TV makers will get it and some will die. Quite the usual progress whenever a new technology disrupts old and ancient business models.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Violating copyrights? I don't think so. . .destroying the fundamental underpinnings of the broadcast television ecosystem? HELL YES!
It's a breach of copyright to *not* download something?
Next, man sued for getting beer during commercials. The assertive defence is that the beer he was getting was in the commercials, but FOX claims that is a moot point. Budweiser to file amicus curiae brief. Says they do not support suing their own customers.
I had a law suite, once. The lease agreement was 249 pages long and I had to pay $500 per hour just to stand in the doorway.
Oh, fuck off.
(Oh, yes, because they can't. Dish's HD DVRs can take an ATSC signal and record from that, and any home that's capable of erecting a satellite dish can erect a normal UHF/VHF antenna too. That's one thing I really rather like about Dish Network.)
Still, they could try, and then Dish subscribers - who don't want to erect an additional antenna - would be denied access to great shows like House, 24, Dollhouse, Terminator: Sarach Connor Chronicles, Firefly, Dark Angel... {insert rest of updated Family Guy skit here}
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
"is going"?
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
I had one too. A friend who works for a firm that has a suite at a sports venue, and apparently they didn't have any customers to entertain on a night when WNBA was playing. It was surprisingly entertaining and even better with the free soda and sandwiches...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
And Simpsons, well, sort of. Simpsons has been going downhill for a while too, but it's still better than 90% of the crap out there.
In a bit of shameless internet panhandling, I accept Litecoin Donations at Lbd2oH9QsthD1GfuUXPyka12YxvWJYnBVf
I understand why Fox and Friends wouldn't like this kind of feature, but what kind of legal ground do they have here? They don't own copyrights on the advertising (well, most of it anyway), and the content they do own (the TV shows) aren't being modified or changed by Dish.
The simple fact that's being reiterated over and over by tech such as commercial-skip and AdBlock is that advertising as a sustainable revenue model is on the way out. At the same time people have started rejecting being shoehorned into the time slots chosen by networks -- most people are willing to pay for their entertainment, but they want to watch it on their own terms, and this also isn't conducive to effective advertising. The sooner content providers realize this, the better off they'll be. The advertising-sponsored entertainment (TV and the Internet primarily) honeymoon is just about over.
Unfortunately for consumers it will probably get worse before it gets better because studios and actors are too accustomed to their over-inflated multi-million dollar salaries. Advertising will become more invasive as it clings for life, and all sorts of litigation will spring up before it finally falls apart. Some forms will always have a place in entertainment (product placement, for example), but eventually consumers will start simply paying for what content they want to consume.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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in the middle. Fox backs of from their idiotic lawsuit, and Dish agrees to quit showing those stupid "Tha hoppa!" commercials.
If this is illegal, what the fuck is a DVR? What the fuck is a VCR? Both can be used to circumvent commercials.
Man, I hope they get their ass smacked down for this, just as those other idiots did in the past in the other lawsuits.
This happened a number of years ago when ReplayTV offered a feature that automatically skipped commercials. A bunch of studios sued them. The result was that the new DVRs required the users to press a "scene skip" button on the remote to skip over the commercial break. ReplayTV was later bought by DirectTV.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Just ask ReplayTV how well this works out in the end.
jesus christ fox is SO fucking stupid.
Wasn't a similar argument made when VCRs came out by the movie industry?
NBC and CBS have joined in as well. DISH has filed a suit themselves seeking a ruling to declare that the technology is not infringing on TV copyrights. http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/24/dish-seeks-ruling-on-feature-that-skips-commercials/
Yeah, skip ads. Offer people the Cadillac of viewing experiences. That's why all the shows are just product placements. It's like the finest missiles that Raytheon can make are being deployed by both sides. I don't care. I'll just sit back and pop some Orville Reddenbacher.
I went years without a TV, so the only time I saw TV was at a hotel, in which case I watched HBO or other premium/ad-free channels. I do own a TV now, but only for netflix streaming. And I occasionally watch Hulu in the browser. So I literally couldn't believe how awful and intrusive the ads were when I was watching the History channel at a hotel a couple weeks ago.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Recording a show that has commercial is the same as if someone had "seen" those commercial for the tv station, meaning they get paid for that view, so being able to skip them on your recording shouldn't matter, considering the tv station won't get any money from the recording itself.
I suspect that Fox will actually lose this in court and when it comes time to renew the contract between Fox and Dish, Fox properties will either no longer be available on Dish or it will be in the contract that their stuff cannot be "hopped".
-Kinsey
Also, lets not forget about Apple's patent on software that would basically freeze our device unless we were demonstrably watching the ads they serve to us, making us answer questions about products featured and even using the camera to make sure that our eyes are focused on the screen.
How long will it be before we see something similar on anything with a front facing camera? I wonder if Microsoft has plans to build this into their next Kinect? This is where these assholes are going with this, and then they'll bitch and complain when even more people just pirate their shit. God, how ridiculous...
destroying the fundamental underpinnings of the broadcast television ecosystem.
Well good. It'll spur change. These old media "ecosystems" need to be torn down.
"That's either incredibly asinine or the most brilliant troll I've ever read. Not sure which." -Anonymous Coward
The failure of your business model is not my problem.
Is there anyway to skip the content and just watch commercials?
Obviously it's silly to sue someone over this tech, however, if users reduce the value of advertising on television by not watching them then these lost revs will have to be made up elsewhere. And that will likely translate to more direct costs to the user.
I don't see the legal issue with it, but certainly if everyone starts using such a service then advertisers will see no value in it and abandon free-to-air and it will die leaving only paid services. Personally I don't have a problem with that as i never watch free-to-air anyway but i know a lot of people would be unhappy about losing free-to-air.
The funny thing to me is that more and more of even my older customers are just saying 'fuck this!" and doing all their TV watching over the net. All this stupid shit does is give folks one more reason to avoid regular TV. I know that even though I have basic cable (its cheaper where I'm at to get the bundle) I haven't even bothered plugging in my cap card so I can watch it because I can watch anything I want to on the net. if they have a commercial i can just pop over to something else while the BS plays (with the sound off in the mixer) and pop back over when its passed.
I don't know if dish is the same as i've never had it but i know that the one time i used the cable for TV it bugged the living piss out of me, because it seemed like every 5 minutes there was another damned commercial. give up having any tension in the story because they'd cut the thing up with so many commercials that it just sucked. No wonder more and more are getting away from traditional TV. Anybody remember the old days when they use to sell cable as "less commercials and more shows!" than regular TV? man are those days over.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Given that quality of TV programming, I fail to see the threat.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
An entrepreneur creates a device that zaps commercials from TV. He's sued and then countersues, winning, and becoming immensely rich. He then improved the offering with a new contraption called PreachNix that deletes religious content.
Needless to say, this was eliminated from that dull, over-earnest film.
But you will have a problem with that. This isn't about free OTA broadcasts. If this renders commercials moot to the point that no one advertises on TV (free OTA or pay channels) the channels will charge even higher fees for cable and satellite companies to carry their channels. Then cable and satellite channels will no longer be subsidized by ads and will get more expensive.
And soon after, gaffer tape gets outlawed as a copyright circumvention device.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
lol it will be like in the 1950 where the commercial will be in the show
autohop doesnt just fast forward which is just time shifting which is a common service it also blacks out the screen which is a material alteration
in the programming. Its also not just a "technological feature" its part of a paid satellite service which is essentially competing against broadcast networks with their own product..
They just whine and whine and whine. First they get their panties in a knot if you watch something they don't want you to watch and now they reason that you must be forced to watch something because that is the way they happen to earn money. Not to mention that broadcast TV is so unbearable that nobody wants to watch it any more.
While I disagree that it's copyright infringement and all that nonsense, I truly hope Fox wins this lawsuit... If Dish wins, then DirecTV and Cable companies will start offering it also, and channels will need to change their business model to supplement the lost income. This means we'll probably start to see more of the really annoying in-show commercials at the bottom of the screen. Or worse, HD shows will start looking like websites with ads down each side, and the middle with the old standard definition size show.
If this is illegal, what the fuck is a DVR? What the fuck is a VCR? Both can be used to circumvent commercials...
Ah, quite right, but apparently fast-forwarding a commercial at 200x and not being able to see a damn thing vs. being able to skip it altogether and not be able to see a damn thing are worlds apart legally...er, somehow.
Be real, who watches ads? Even when watching the few shows I watch religiously every week, where my eyes are glued to the screen during the show, I hardly notice the ads, let alone could tell you which ads I just saw or even come up with some kind of detail, or what product they tried to cram down my throat.
And I'm hardly special in this way. Try it. Go watch TV with your pals, don't tell them before and then, after the show, ask them to come up with five commercial they just saw and offer them 10 bucks if they succeed.
I betcha you won't spend a dime on this experiment.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You are saying you didn't enjoy television viewing interrupted every 5 or 10 minutes with brief playlets and illustrated lectures about the purchase of consumer goods?
Outrageous. What's the world coming to?
.
I doubt anyone would actually watch TV if they had to do that.
Fox claims that giving viewers the ability to skip commercials on recorded television shows demonstrates the "clear goal of violating copyrights and destroying the fundamental underpinnings of the broadcast television ecosystem."
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Just to clear things up. Just because someone comes up with tech you don't like, that doesn't mean that you can claim "copyright violation". If it is okay to record all of it, then it must be okay to record part of it. And before you ask, no you can't file a DMCA takedown notice either.
Oh, and destroying underpinnings is called capitalism. Ask anyone who manufactures buggy whips these days. Oh that's right, automobiles destroyed the buggy industry's underpinnings. I forgot.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Also, lets not forget about Apple's patent on software that would basically freeze our device unless we were demonstrably watching the ads they serve to us, making us answer questions about products featured and even using the camera to make sure that our eyes are focused on the screen.
How long will it be before we see something similar on anything with a front facing camera? I wonder if Microsoft has plans to build this into their next Kinect? This is where these assholes are going with this, and then they'll bitch and complain when even more people just pirate their shit. God, how ridiculous...
Ah, you must have seen "A Clockwork Orange".
.
Personally I don't have a problem with that as i never watch free-to-air anyway
So not only are you missing the commercials you are missing all the product placements in the program as well? I'd start looking for a lawyer...
According to FOX, the viewer skipping the commercials results in the "clear goal of violating copyrights." Even if the broadcast program is considered a protected work from start to finish, inclusive of all content broadcast with it. Isn't FOX implying that they also by extension own the copyright of all the commercials broadcast within a program?
I'm sure the producers of the commercials would have a few things to say about that. Also, might the original producers of programming (movies especially), might consider the insertion of content within their product and copyright asserted to the end result as a whole, a violation of THEIR copyrighted material.
no voiding of bladders during commercials.
Most advertisers don't pay for time-shifted viewings--i.e. They base advertising off of the numbers a show gets in it's airing. If they do pay, it's at a very reduced rate. The hopper autoskip only works on Time-shifted viewings. As far as the networks are concerned, their viewers would have been counted when it was recorded.
Also, Dish network has to pay OTA broadcast networks for carriage... I.e. What is free to anyone with an antenna costs money to those who want to see it over Satellite. I think this is basically Dish's ploy to renegotiate that--Dish is already paying FOX for the rights to carry their shows, so FOX needs to decide which it wants: charge customers to watch the shows, or charge advertisers. Right now Fox is getting both.
What really makes me wonder what these idiots are smoking is if average Joe gets up and looks for snacks , grabs his wife's boobs, accidentally sharts and has to hit the bathroom, is he violating the contract that makes TV possible?
Why aren't people who pay for cable TV being taxed (so to speak) twice? Once for the subscription and once again for the fucking ads? One of cable TVs big "draws" in the early days was "no commercials..." That didn't last.
Basically we have a bunch of suits who have no idea how stupid they sound... I don't know what's more sad, the idea itself or the actual spreading of the idea... I have this sneaking suspicion no one at Fox (Hey Rupert, suck my crank!) has a voice in their head that tells them "that's a bad idea... keep it to yourself." I imagine they learned about electricity by sticking a fork in a light socket too.
Explains a great many things, I think.. Suffice to say, is there anyone sane left in the entertainment industry? My decision to skip the theater and rental counter is becoming a better and better idea.
I think Joe Sixpack slapped with a lawsuit for getting beer might wake the sheeple up enough to say "what the fuck?" instead of "ooooh. I gotta drop mad bank on a 3D tv so I can experience movies how they were MEANT to be seen! To the Best Buy!"
It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
People already have the means to skip commercials, it's the little buttons on their remotes that skip forward 15 to 30 seconds at a point. This just takes most of the guesswork out of it.
And as to Copyright? wtf? The copyright is on the movie or televesion show - it's not on the television show with commercials, otherwise the DVD releases would have commercials in the episodes as well.
This is purely a means to try and get more money. I hope Dish gives em both barrels. Fuck em and their commercials.
I haven't watched a commercial that I wasn't interested in in over 5 years.
Meh, they give me the ability to record programs and skip through the ads anyway, they obviously don't see that as a problem.
1. You can't just rebroadcast a television signal, even if it is an OTA broadcast. That is part of the law and the NAB will remind you of it if you ever think about doing it. Rebroadcasting it would be a violation of US copyright law. You have to get a license from the content provider to broadcast. (Lots of cases in US copyright law revolve around whether some action qualifies as 'broadcasting'.)
2. Dish has legal agreements with Fox (and the other networks) to rebroadcast their programming. I have a hard time believing that Dish's actions here aren't a violation of those agreements and pulled the plug. That does raise the question of why haven't they.
3. Networks and individual stations routinely get in fights with Dish and DirecTV and cut-off their service.
You and I have an individual right to FF over the commercials. As a rebroadcaster of someone else's content stream, Dish has legal obligations that you and I don't have.
I've already payed my provider for that content and I should be able to do whatever the fuck I want with it. Greedy cocksuckers.
Sorry but as far as I am concerned, this became legal the moment we started paying a monthly fee to view the channel. It is either add supported and we are watching them to fund the show or it is subscriber supported in which case we don't need to see the damn commercials and there shouldn't even be any to begin with as we didn't pay to see commercials, we paid to see the shows.
I was actually quite surprised recently when I re-order cable television to watch the Canucks lose in the first round of the playoffs.. I was surprised at all the products, movies, and television that I had no idea about until I saw commercials on tv for the first time in two years. Maybe I'm unique, but I doubt that. I think commericals and advertisements have more effect on us than most people are willing to admit. I'll go out on a limb and say that advertising via commericals on television still works for companies (especially clever and memorable ones such as Coke or Apple)
As a general rule, you'll find roughly 1/3 of a show is commercials. So an hour long show has ~40 minutes of content, and a half hour long show has roughly 20 minutes of content. Technically, most avi's and streams will show times a bit longer than that, but that very frequently counts the opening theme and ending credits. And the ending credits especially are very frequently shoved to the back so they can show you more commercials anyway. This particularly bugged me because one show I was watching at the time (can't remember what now) had some actual content during the credits that was minimized and muted.
Hopefully this will remain purely a theoretical question, but seriously, what would happen if they won?
The *only* way I can see this being copyright infringement is if a judge rules a) copying any broadcast (legally obtained, and for personal use) is piracy, overturning mountains of precedent, or b) the show + commercials combined are the "work", and that there's some unlegislated "right to artistic integrity" or something that means you cannot take a work and redistribute only parts.
Both of those are patently (hah!) ludicrous, but let's assume, for a moment, that reality is in fact as strange as this fiction.
If (a) happens, well, goodbye fair use, goodbye archival copies. No more taping TV shows. No more saving videos to disk. No more caching or buffering video, even - after all, what is a video buffer but a way to time-shift the broadcast by a few seconds?
If (b) happens, it gets even worse. Want to quote something? Better quote the entire thing - except you can't do that, because that's piracy. So no more quoting. No more referencing. No more citations or excerpts. Want to walk out of a movie theater mid-showing? You just broke the law. Want to stop reading a book halfway through? Off to a cell with ye!
Hell, even if the ruling is just a limited "you can't skip commercials" ban, ignoring any semblance of actually paying attention to the "law", that's terrible. If you're going to ban a machine skipping commercials automatically, you'll have to ban machines skipping them manually - so no DVR, no videotaping, without some mechanism to force ads to play. And why limit it to "with a machine"? Ban muting commercials, or leaving the room, or talking over them.
Congratulations, Fox. You just filed the dumbest lawsuit I've ever seen in the US system.
The sad thing? Their lawyers have to know it's completely hopeless. Their hope *has* to be that they have deeper pockets than Dish, and can essentially bankrupt them with legal costs.
I'd say there ought to be a law against that sort of thing, but I fear that would just make things worse.
Would you prefer to have every channel priced the same as HBO?
Good thing some people are willing to go ahead and cut the adverts before posting on youtube, like to see how fox deals with that fact. And with noscript and adblock I NEVER see a advert on youtube, only on embedded vids. Figure if I need something I'll look it up myself.
Then you have free to torrent. And?
Personally I couldn't care less, I haven't found anything worth watching even for free in quite some time. The answer is the same, though-you're relying on a certain subset of people not wanting to get it for free (or ad-free), and the rest are already gone. The more inconvenient you make it, the smaller that pool becomes.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
Then how do you explain that MyCleanPC guy stands out among the other spammers here?
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Commercial_Detection
One of the best features of MythTV. If you trust the algorithm you can have it automatically detect commercial blocks at record time and auto skip them as you watch.
I bet dollars to donoughts that the rest of the MAFIAA will jump on the "Sue Dish network" bandwagon here very soon, and they will keep suing until Dish goes belly up. Fuck, even NBC will even jump on the bandwagon due to the fact they are owned by Crapcast. This will give Crapcast the excuse they need to eliminante another competitor and DirecTv would love it as well.
We have now arrived well within step #2 of the plan I laid out before. Wait for some more networks to jump on this litigation bandwagon, then offer to shelve AutoHop in exchange for offering their channels a la carte, even at up to triple each channel's carrier rate. This way, people who actually want ESPN can pay ~$15 for it, instead of everyone paying ~$5.
This is clearly a stupid claim for Fox to make,and i don't see them getting this tech banned any time soon.
I worry a little bit about what it will lead to though. TV companies aren't going to give up and go home, and businesses still want to advertise crap to us. I foresee a near future where all these ads will just get moved into "banners" (or similar) and displayed/overlaid *during* the show (this may happen at the source as part of the broadcast, or by the TV - youtube style). At this point we'll probably wish all we had ad-breaks back...
There is a world of difference between fast forward, which can manually be used to skip commercials and can also be used just to skip forward in a show and this. The only purpose of the auto hopper is to skip commercials with no manual intervention.
I'm torn on this. On one hand, once you record it, you should be able to do what you want with it. On the other, this is a pretty straight forward case of a company changing copyrighted works and profiting from them.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
How does skipping commercials violate copyright?
Be seeing you...
Why aren't people who pay for cable TV being taxed (so to speak) twice? Once for the subscription and once again for the fucking ads?
one would assume they are taxed on their net profits, which would include the revenue from both these sources. i haven't actually lookid into this though.
i spent five minutes thinking and all i got was this crappy sig
Once for the subscription and once again for the fucking ads? One of cable TVs big "draws" in the early days was "no commercials..." That didn't last.
I hear ya. Same for Satellite radio. Bought my first new car with one two months back and I was quite surprised to hear commercials on the non-native channels (Fox, CNN, etc).
Even more annoying was that they appeared to be the same 5 damned UBER obnoxious ones over and over. Hell, the most obnoxious one was for one of the native Sirius channels that I expect doesnt get much listenership. (I dont recall the channel but it was VERY niche... ) While they love to tout the fact that you can listen to the same station cross country without losing it, they make it so you dont WANT to listen to it cross country...
I fear this is what the plan is for the future.
The really pathetic thing is that instead of a sensible ratio of programming to advertisements, the networks - to include the cable only channels - are taking a dual approach. A 50/50 mix on television, un-skippable ads and threats on DVD.
Is there any wonder that people pirate movies? Lessee, it's easier, you don't have a hour and a half movie taking three hours, don't have to listen to mind boggling stupid commercials. And I've taken the alternate route. I don't watch many movies at all any more. Which means I do not see the advertising.
If Television is attempting suicide, it's working as as far as I am concerned.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2842591&cid=39963587
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
That's not how advertising works. there have been numerous studies into the effectiveness of advertising - generally all stating that it works
On the other hand, most of these studies were likely done by advertising companies/marketing divisions who stand to profit in people believing they are effective.
Overall i'd say the evidence points towards advertising having an effect.
i spent five minutes thinking and all i got was this crappy sig
Honestly, I don't really care about the TV issue one way or the other; but the potential precedent is ugly.
If Dish's plan were to tape the broadcasts, chop out the chaff, and send you the final cut, that'd be a clear-cut case of a copyright infringing unauthorized derivative work.
However, their actual implementation, as best I've been able to tell, doesn't modify the copyrighted source material at all, it just adds specific automated behavior to the playback device. If that is 'copyright infringement' then virtually anything a playback device might choose to get fancy about is subject to the veto of team content. Automatic volume reduction on your music when you get a phone call? Sure. Replaygain volume normalization? Sure. Stretching or letterboxing to put 4:3 on 16:9 or vice-versa? Why certainly. Applying a custom CSS stylesheet to a website against the operator's wishes? You bet.
Yes, it may well happen to be true that OTA broadcasts aren't going to be helped by easy commercial skipping; but something isn't 'copyright infringement' merely because it happens to be bad for the checkbooks of people who hold copyrights. It also has to, y'know, infringe. In this case, if the definition of 'infringement' is stretched far enough to save our poor, beleaguered, broadcasters it is stretched far enough to allow near-total control over any device that handles rendering of copyrighted material, which is virtually anything.
Compared to that, letting all of broadcast TV burn looks like a fantastic idea, even if you are otherwise sympathetic to it...
Echostar is a much larger company than sonicblue was, so I think they'd have a correspondingly stronger legal muscle.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
I was a big replay TV fan. I had one of the original showstoppers and was going to upgrade to the unit with the auto skip feature. The hope was when SoncBlue bought the company they might have the resources to fight the lawsuits. If I recall correctly, they could not afford to defend the law suits and ultimately sold out all of their technology to DirecTV after filing bankruptcy.
The fact is that nobody is really going to win here... Fox and all of network TV will raises prices at least for Dish, so then customers will have to pay more. The cablecos will raise prices regardless, but will also cap their broadband ISP business, so Hulu and Netflix will be hurt, again hurting customers. In the end, is all about media/content wanting more money than customers can afford... and the 5% of quality entertainment will suffering as the 95% of the junk also gets slashed (no loss there). We should all go back to board games and local theatre...
Commercials are just one of many areas where companies won't let "the market decide"
This reminds me of a while back when I was telling some people about this cool recording device I have.
It is not tied to any provider, no subscription needed, I can record shows off of cable or OTA TV, it stores them on removable media that I can give to anyone with a similar unit to play back, it can quickly move past commercials, etc...
Them: "wow that is awesome, what is it called?"
Me: A VCR.
I wonder if these folks would be shocked to hear that even VCR's had a feature known as 'Fast Forward'. It was a ground breaking function that allowed one to skip content they did not want to see on a recording.
And soon after, gaffer tape gets outlawed as a copyright circumvention device.
How? I thought it was just a nipple supression device. >:)
You might want to take a look at what occurred with ReplayTV. They were sued for this very thing, lost, and were forced to remove the option from new hardware. Needless to say they didn't last. I'm surprised the TiVO 30 second skip Easter egg hasn't gotten them slapped....
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
...I used to skip commercials by fast-forwarding through them on my VCR. This is something that I regret to this day. The guilt is unbearable. :'(
How exactly have they changed it? The content is likely still on the disk, they just sense the commercials and skip ala ReplayTV. Replay was sued and lost on this BTW. I wonder when the TiVO 30second skip will get them sued as it pretty much allows you to jump over commercials too. 30second forward, 15 back - love it!
As for recording it and being allowed to do what you want - if you think anyone believes that in the industry you've not been paying attention. They want it locked up in a steel box, how dare you wish to move it to another device!
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
This appears to me to be a destructive process.
1. TV Station uses adverts to give stuff for free.
2. Profit!
3. DVR vendor creates feature to subvert adverts.
4. Profit!
5. TV Station revenues drop as adverts stop earning them money.
6. TV Station closes.
7. DVR vendor revenues drop as TV station does not exist.
8. DVR vendor shuts down.
9. ???
10. Profit (for who?)
Here is a simple solution to the problem which should keep Fox happy.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
it will be like in the 1950 where the commercial will be in the show
Do you watch "The Amazing Race?" Ads for Ford, Travelocity etc. are right in the show.
Hopefully it's a suite with a good view.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
The Betamax decision hinged on the VCR having substantial non-infringing uses, specifically time-shifting (watching a program at a time other than its broadcast).
This particular feature has no non-infringing use.
On the other, this is a pretty straight forward case of a company changing copyrighted works and profiting from them.
They aren't changing anything, the content is still the same and its presumably still there, its just skipped over. The commercials are controlled by the broadcaster and not the television studio who made the TV show afaik. Since this isn't for TV shows as they air (you have to record it first) I don't see much of a problem. You still can't skip commercials on live television (live meaning new episodes first airing). Honestly who here with a DVR records their shows and then actually watches all the commercials? Not a lot thats for sure, most would fast forward as fast as they could to get back to the show.
I'm neither a Dish subscriber nor do I watch Fox programming (or, if I do, I wait until it's available on DVD/streaming regardless). In comparison to Netflix and the like, current DVR offerings from cable and satellite companies (the ones who carry these networks) are a poor substitute.
Let them blow their legal budgets on rearranging deck chairs on sinking ship. That in and of itself is both more entertaining and less expensive to watch than either company's offerings.
I wouldn't say they were modifying copyrighted content, per se. The offense they are trying to infer is making a device that is modifying the format of the time slot, reducing the broadcasters ability to monetize the show. It's not an issue of modifying the story being shown and treating it as their own work.
Not only that, some VCR remotes had a button specifically designed to make it easy to skip commercials: each press skipped by forward 30 seconds.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
If the cheap bastards that create them would stop and think that they should only run them once, and create
new and valuable non-repeating stock, then no one would want to miss them.
Just like Japanese Commercials, they don't insult the customers, they just try hard and make thousands of
versions that are valuable.
Should I say : 'Madison Avenue' as if the term has any relevance any more, is about as informed and modern
as the RIAA and MPAA.
They have all earned our scorn, and there is no coming back for these clowns.
We may be the sheep, but we've got the cash these cockroaches want.
We need to continue to treat them like the whores that they are.
jr
Why arent movie producers (artists) suing TV stations for putting adverts in the middle of their "artwork"? Surely that is " violating copyright" as it is not showing the movie as the artist intended.
The uverse DVR remotes have a short hop button too. It was particularly useful for commercials. Now if only ATT get rid of their shitty cisco DVR's running windows.
As such, none of this matters in any significant sense.
If you think TV is not for idiots, you ARE A FUCKING IDIOT.
Any questions, bitches ?
And property will quit watching TV. Where's the problem?
During the court case the lawyers for Dish should interrupt the Fox lawyers and/or the judge every 10 minutes and do 5 minutes of product placement.
If the Fox lawyers object to product placement as a being a waste of time or distracting the Dish guys will win a moral victory.
When the Dish lawyers do the product placement they should do in loudly.
Fox 'avoids' paying taxes but now cries for the government to bail them out and protect their outdated business model.
When workers get laid off, Fox claimed kept repeating that it was only because they were lazy and their skills were not needed any more.
Well, Fox is lazy and their skills are not needed any more.
Besides, Murdoch was *convicted* of organized criminal activity in the UK.
Murdoch was barred from being a director of any publically traded company in the UK.
Instead of a bailout, they should be investigated in the US the same way they were in the UK.
They should have added that people that skips commercial eat babies, have Hitler as their step brother and made a pact with satan, their uncles.
They are so funny.
Overall i'd say the evidence points towards advertising having an effect.
I agree. It tends to make me not want to watch any ads. I think I've bought about five universal remotes in the past decade due to worn out mute buttons. Make advertising less obnoxious, and maybe people wouldn't mind watching it. Do shit like in this article, and watch your subscriber base tank.
No, there is no other solution. We're not stupid, and we can go elsewhere.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
>Hopefully it's a suite with a good view.
It's suite of suits they'll be bringing.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
Even MORE annoying is the music stations have some voiceovers in the songs naming the song and artist (thus ruining it). The voiceovers are whispered in a pleasant tone, like you're not supposed to hear them, but they stand out like a sore thumb.
I've been noticing this tactic for about 10 years now. There aren't any commercials in the first 15-20 minutes of the show, but as the show progresses the percentage of commercials approches 50%. It seems like they're stretching just how much you will put up with after you've been hooked.
I don't think I could watch TV without MythTV's auto commercial detection any more.
Two questions:
1. Has anyone here built an opensource DVR that records Hi-Def from *composite* inputs?
2. DVRs cannot record HDMI streams in hi-def due to HDCP protection.
But does HDCP allow a 'pass-through' device to 'time-shift' the HDCP protected stream using its buffers? E.g. Skip the upcoming 'FBI warnings' on Blu-ray movies.
Haven't things like Tivo been doing this kind of thing for years now? Is this something new in TV-land?
I don't respond to AC's.
In what way is the program's copyright related to the commercial's copyright? Foxis the broadcaster, they don't necessarily own the program, and the definitly don't own the commericals.
This particular feature has no non-infringing use.
"No non-infringing use" isn't the same as "an infringing use."
In this case, if the definition of 'infringement' is stretched far enough to save our poor, beleaguered, broadcasters it is stretched far enough to allow near-total control over any device that handles rendering of copyrighted material, which is virtually anything.
The next obvious step is that you are "infringing" if you turn off Crappy Show to watch something else. After that, the act of not turning on Crappy Show will be infringement.
They're just now suing someone? I've been skipping commercials for almost a decade now with MythTV... surprised it took this long.
We all knew this was coming. It is not a hard argument to make that skipping commercials is basically equivalent to pirating content. It makes little difference if you are stealing by not paying with dollars or stealing by not paying with ad views. Current copyright is simply awful. How in the world is a book like Caves of Steel $7.99 for an ebook. Written nearly 60 years ago. Somehow society at large is okay with this. Our only hope is that lawsuits like this will help to make people understand how ridiculous our current copyright law is.
new era cap on sale
and in England on the BBC channels I remember that there use to be this small box up in the top left corner 30 seconds before add breaks so you could stop your vcr from recording them at all
I wonder if YOU would be to hear that there WAS a lawsuit pretty much for that reason a Long long time ago...
Home and professional recording
One other major consequence of the Betamax technology's introduction to the U.S. was the lawsuit Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios (1984, the "Betamax case"), with the U.S. Supreme Court determining home videotaping to be legal in the United States, wherein home videotape cassette recorders were a legal technology since they had substantial noninfringing uses. This precedent was later invoked in MGM v. Grokster (2005), where the high court agreed that the same "substantial noninfringing uses" standard applies to authors and vendors of peer-to-peer file sharing software (notably excepting those who "actively induce" copyright infringement through "purposeful, culpable expression and conduct").
I could have just linked BUT I think that copying for personal use is rather appropriate in a story like this. See? A small unknown and rather likable company always looking out to protect the common man against big evil media companies, Sony, stood their ground and gave us the VCR and made it so that ungrateful snots like DJRumpy don't even remember that once the media he has been spoonfed since birth wanted to deny him this.
Mind you, all this is an old story that has to deal with one of those "everyone knows the social rule but nobody follows it because we are all special but others should follow it because they are not".
Fox has a point, oh my god I will go to hell for that, TV broadcasting gets it money by giving YOU TV and advertisters eyeballs to watch the commercials. It is pretty straight forward entertainment advertising. You watch the pretty girl strut her stuff, you take in that smoking might be good for you after all. Soaps made this very clear, "Women of the world, you like endless drama that never ever gets to a point? Well, we at your favority washing powder brand (and since we give you this lovely tv, surely we are) give you what you want, both on the TV and in the washing machine!".
Of course, this social contract sorta goes two ways. The advertiser actually has to put on a show. The girl has to be pretty, the TV for women absolutely devoid of any intelligence whatsoever. It is NOT part of the contract to completely saturate the viewer and remove any actual entertainment no matter how vapid from the stream. You shouldn't put the pretty girl completely inside the giant pack of smokes. The deal is, nice bits stick out to make it worth looking at her!
TV now has a cable cost, special channels cost extra subscription fees and in exchange for this, we get even MORE commercials!
It is NOT that people hate commercials, see the superbowl ads but it is that when you PUT them freaking everywhere and turn the super bowl into 3 hours of commercials and 15 minutes of action (actually, ain't it already that? Perhaps I should not have used the most boring sport in the world as an example) with the action overlaid and surrounded by ads people just get annoyed.
If you put on a production of a classical piece of theather say eh.... Hamlet ( I do know more then one piece, I assure you! I am not an American after all, no I don't have to proof it) and put up a message "this brought to you by Coca Cola" few would mind. You might even put a banner beside the stage for the brand. BUT if you start to go "To drink Coke or to drink a lesser known brand" people will start to get upset.
Soaps were okay to be interrupted every now and then, after all it gave the women sometime to do some actually bloody housework. It always struck me as odd how women can claim house work is so fucking hard when there is all this TV aimed at them during their supposed working hours. How many TV programs are on during the day aimed at men at work? ZERO! Men don't get to lay on the sofa and watch TV all day dammit! We got to mess around with that new sexy teen girl intern non-stop! How about my wife mess around with the intern and I lay on the
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Perfect. Then the cable companies will be forced to offer many of their more expensive channels a la carte, and I'll no longer have to subsidize all the folks who watch networks like ESPN that I don't care about.
Even better, we, the subscribers, will have more of a voice when it comes to the content, and it will no longer be profitable to do stupid crap like airing wrestling on the Sci-Fi channel just to bring in more ad revenue.
I fail to see the downside here. Instead of hidden costs that we pay by buying products from companies who have to make up for all the money they spent on ads, we'll simply be paying those fees directly to the entertainment companies. In the long run, the cost should be about the same; it will just be easier to see the bottom line.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
One thing to consider is that this does not skip all commercials all the time. It only skips commercials on certain prime-time shows and it will only do it after about 1AM the following morning. As far as I can tell this is because the feature is human-powered and the data gets pushed to the units after someone has had time to sit down and mark the commercials.
Blog
destroying the fundamental underpinnings of the broadcast television ecosystem
Prepare to engage the Concern Drive!
3...
2...
1...
Engage!
kLanK! Whirrrrrr....
***** CONCERN DRIVE FAILURE *****
Oh dear. I appear to be unconcerned about the, um, "fundamental underpinnings of the broadcast television ecosystem." Even my broadcast television based parody has ironically failed to create any detectable degree of concern.
Enjoy your pay cut.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
The whole fulcrum of this industry lies on if people are lazy enough to skip commercials or not! Heaven forbid should this task be accomplished in 1 button press, rather than the manual alternative.
A suitable suite in those circumstances, then.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
"destroying the fundamental underpinnings of the broadcast television ecosystem"
I am crying for them. Seriously.
I wouldn't be surprised if they sued me for all the TV I didn't watch back when I did have cable TV, since that also meant I didn't see their ads. And then they could sue again because I cancelled my cable TV subscription so I am still not seeing their ads.
Ah well, if they try, I say...
Bring it on!
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y129/Scarletdown/COH/Bringit.jpg
This space unintentionally left blank.
Say good bye to the Mute button!
I haven't found anything worth watching even for free in quite some time.
I highly recommend Breaking Bad.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I still think the bible thumpers won't support us in this case. Even if it does suppress nipples.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Because the old memes got, well, old and we needed something new to make fun of.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I don't think Echostar really wants to skip commercials. They've been larding up the UI with ads the last few years (though not nearly as bas as the cable company's DVRs). I think what they want to do is use this as a bargaining chip.
FOX and ABC in particular have been sticking it to service providers. Sure, they'll renew a contract for the local affiliate... after you pay more money for some other channels.
Replay did not lose. People who misunderstand the difference between settling and losing contribute greatly to legal misunderstandings in this country.
Do the research.
It's all in the color of the bits.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
If Dish's plan were to tape the broadcasts, chop out the chaff, and send you the final cut, that'd be a clear-cut case of a copyright infringing unauthorized derivative work.
Why? It doesn't seem so to me. The show itself is under one copyright. The commercials are under another. Is Fox claiming that the entire video stream copyrighted?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Why doesn't Fox just say Dish can't broadcast their content? After all, if it's truly hurting News Corp to have Fox played with the option to skip commercials, then it's not profitable to continue streaming to Dish. Isn't that how the free market should sort itself out here? That's not what it's about, is it?
...being able to skip it altogether and not be able to see a damn thing...
MythTV does commercial skipping exactly that - for well behaved shows anyway - otherwise it's close to that.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
MythTV has a commercial skip functionality which attempts to automate the detection with several factors (frame, scene change, logo removal). I had thought they included decibel, but I see no mention of that now.
SciFi (SyFy now) seemed to take great joy in mucking with this or at least only their prime time shows seemed to anger the mythtv gods. At least when they had programming I watched. On a side note, WOW, nostalgia begged me to see what their schedule looks like and I'm now completely surprised they are still on the air.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
Er...BBC doesn't have adverts. Never has, hopefully never will.
The consumer is then directing the device to behave in a certain way. Any responsibility is therefore the consumer's rather than the manufacturer of the device.
or a bought-outright DVR. Many options.
lol SCI FI is ... SyFy.
One of the major feature of Tivo was automatically skipping commercials and they were almost destroyed by bid media companies for it.
If they don't get rid of this tech, the ads will start becoming part of the story for your favourite show! Or split screen ads that move about randomly to avoid being cropped out of the show.
Agree 100%. ReplayTV failed at fighting big TV, methinks that Dish will have a better shot. Skipping commercials on a DVR is not a copyright issue, rather a consumer preference. I think that Dish is betting on winning this is court, and in being that service that fought the good fight to give their users a better experience.
Actually since the switch to digital tv signal, I have not watched tv since. My perfectly clear signal turned into a blocky, hiccuping, sound dropping, freeze framing, unwatchable pile of useless rubbish, spending more time messing with the antenna trying to get a decent signal than anything. So I switched to netflix and never went back. Oh hey.. netflix doesn't have commercials. Clearly they are out to destroy Fox.
Wrestling is surprisingly Sci-Fi. The science is in the steroids, and the fiction is in the wrestling.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
I can't even watch it over the net in most cases, which I assume you mean torrents.
Hulu was never an option because I could not skip the commercials, and Hulu Plus will start requiring a cable subscription anyways (or so I have been led to believe).
All the overlay ads during the program are so fucking obnoxious it takes all the joy and immersion right out of a program. Was over at my parents watching something and the overlay on the bottom was so big it actually obscured part of the program they were actively focusing on. Really?
All I can do now is wait for a web rip which has no overlays as well as no commercials. At that point I just don't give a shit as much. Other than Fringe and a couple of other shows I get web ripped, I am now waiting for the DVD box set or just watching it on Netflix.
These asshats have totally fucked up TV for good. I can remember when you had nearly 25 minutes of content for a 30 minute show and they seemed to survive just fine. Those days are gone for good.
I trust Fox are honest with their advertisers and are absolutely clear with them on exactly what percentage of the viewers will actually watch the advertising.
Like every other problem in the world, it's the governments fault.
Fox (and friends) makes money on TV shows in two ways: You buy their channel on [insert TV provider here]. Otherwise, they make money from advertisers. If they have a show that has 1 million viewers, the ads that are played during and around that show are worth 1 million possible ad views. That's worth some money, and Fox (and friends) will extract the value of good programming in this manner from the advertisers.
So there is a reason why Fox (and friends) are not interested in you skipping their commercials. If the box automatically skips the commercials, the advertisers can claim that there were no ad-view from that viewer, effectively lowering the overall value of the ads on the show.
Let's say that Fox (and Friends) win. No big deal, we have to press a button to skip commercials, just like we have done for years.
Now let's say Dish wins. One or many of the following may occur:
a) Fox (and friends) start to insert their advertisements directly into their shows. They already do this, in a limited fashion. Imagine much more invasive ads.
b) Dish (and their competitors) starts to skip commercials on a ALL channels, all the time. (The current version only hops adds automatically the next day, you can't do that the day of.) This leads to...
c) Advertisers reduce the amount of money they give to the channels. Because of the decreased revenue...
d) Fox (and friends) start to charge more for upfront for their channels and/or...
e) Fox (and friends) start making cheaper to produce content.
Is that what will happen? Maybe. Is that what we want? Maybe not.
--Pathway
-----
Disclaimer: I am a long-time customer of Dish Networks. I do not currently own the Hopper, but I have followed its' release. I am an advocate of IPTV, and I feel that Dish currently provides the best IPTV solution with their Sling purchase. I do not watch the TV show "Fox & Friends." The repetitive use of the term was intended as a joke. Laugh, it's funny. Especially since you have read this far.
Oh, they do see it as a problem, they just hadn't found anyone to sue who has deep enough pockets until now.
You'd be shocked and out a lot of cash if you did this experiment. Just because YOU have no attention span or memory doesn't mean other people do. Those often annoying, frequently offensive and flashy ads DO cause people to remember them, even if they don't realize they remember.
It's why the companies producing them pay the money to have them air. If they didn't work, the people behind them would have figured it out a long time ago. Even if you don't get the entire message, the simple fact that a certain pizzeria or deodorant maker has reminded you their product exists will cause an association in your mind that results in a statistically significant increase in the likelihood that you will find yourself purchasing that product sooner than you might have otherwise, and that you will be more likely to buy that particular company's product than a competitor without the ad.
Even if you only catch it out of the corner of your eye, you have still caught it. The Madison Avenue people know this. Psychologists, sociologists and the like know this. The people who spend the time, money, and effort to advertise know this, hence why they shell out by the collective billions each year for advertisements you claim no one watches.
The only person who doesn't know this, seems to be YOU. But by all means continue living in your fantasy world in which no one has the power to influence you. By the way, what brand car do you drive? How did you decide to buy that particular brand? Was it random chance? Did you buy from the dealership that was closest? Or did something else... influence your decision?
Perfectly put. The irony behind this statement says it all for idiots like FOX "clear goal of violating copyrights and destroying the fundamental underpinnings of the broadcast television ecosystem." And FOX has in no way already done this.
I said it before stop making fuckin stupid ads I may watch them, I cannot watch them and I toke up, either high or sober I am afraid I could go insane from the ads, let alone the brain dead programming all the networks run..
It should not surprise anyone, the MPAA and RIAA are communists so are Networks.
At least you'd then have television without adverts, even if you did have to pay a little more. As a Brit brought up on the BBC, take my word for it- it's very pleasant.
Not only that, some VCR remotes had a button specifically designed to make it easy to skip commercials: each press skipped by forward 30 seconds.
First, that's a little different than a feature which listens for the ad triggers and auto-skips them, and doesn't skip any of the rest of the recording.
Second, you were technically violating copyright (in most cases) by recording the programming to start with.
Third, the VCR company never had any agreement with the networks to run or play ads for them.
Completely different situations.
Yes they have commercials, only difference they are for their own programmes.
Actually they don't, because they explicitly license the content on terms that allow for timeshift recording so you can fast-forward, they didn't have such terms in the content licenses for Dish.
I see... trouble on the way...
Here's the problem: there's money to be made, so they will keep it up until there isn't. It's a basic rule. It's like why there's life virtually everywhere on Earth. If there's food, something will adapt to feed off it.
So this is what I see. Fox loses, which hardly matters, because as time goes by, people watch less and less of the ads anyway, and they've been putting products into the programs for a while, (product placement). For a while, promo's for other shows often pop up during the program, usually in the form of a bar along the bottom. It's fairly unobtrusive.
How long before the only way these people can continue to ensure the cash to support their crack-habits keeps rolling in is to defeat any attempt to avoid the ads by overlaying them directly on top of the shows, in the form of either top and/or bottom crawls, overlays, etc.? How do you skip an ad that is overlayed on top of some portion of the program while it's going on? You'll be watching a show, and a blue bar will pop up on the bottom, with a picture of a group of teenagers of various ethnicities drinking a distinctive style beverage, and the text next to it will read "This program has been brought to you in part by " and the name of the beverage company... How are you going to avoid that? Especially if they have the actors actually look down at certain strategic moments in the program, causing you to follow their eyes to see what they're looking at... a response most people have to seeing someone looking intently into somewhere in the distance.
I'm not looking forward to that, but I predict it will eventually happen.
If I can't skip the ad's YOU are taking my electric energy for that. So pay ME if I have to view them!
We make legislation to make smoking annoying, because it is harmful. Why not do the same with television?
What contract? Where is the meeting of minds, the exchange of due considerations... there is no contract between the TV viewer and the advertiser... this is why they are going for copyright breach...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
I don't think you need to go back so far as the 50s.
Hell, look at every big 80s franchise that's been rebooted in the past 5 years. Pretty sure all of them started out as 20-minute animated commercials. ;)
I have a ReplayTV (3 of them). They were sued. The company went out of business.
The devices still skip right past commercials. That's why I use them.
E
If this is illegal, what the fuck is a DVR? What the fuck is a VCR? Both can be used to circumvent commercials.
Man, I hope they get their ass smacked down for this, just as those other idiots did in the past in the other lawsuits.
Stop rating this shit insightful, mods. This is the first goddamn question everybody asks, he's not delivering any answers and it's been asked several times already. This isn't fucking FaceBook, and the Insightful rating is not a "Like" or "Agree" button so quit using it like that.
The DVR cannot skip anything. It does not listen for queue tone triggers and auto-skip ad blocks. And most importantly, it's being provided BY the dish/cable company as opposed to be a standalone device you purchased and hooked up yourself. Thus, giving a feature which is ONLY for skipping ads is violating the agreement between the cable/dish provider and the network (at least that's their claim). A 3rd party device has no agreement with the networks, OR the cable/dish company, so it's a different situation.
As for VCR's, the VCR company does not have an agreement with the networks to play ads for them. And you're probably already violating their copyright by recording it in the first place.
You people need to get a grip. This is a contract dispute between the two parties, it's not a criminal case. While the result might lend some weight to other civil suits, it's not setting any kind of legal precedent.
And since someone will ask, I'll just mention that fast-forward is a different type of feature which can be used in any part of the recording. Since it's purpose is not specifically aimed at the ads it would be a pretty long shot to call it "intended to bypass commercials". And to be blunt, I've seen plenty of people actually stop the fast-forward to watch a commercial- even though you don't see the whole thing you ARE still seeing part of the commercial. And honestly, you're probably paying more attention to the ads during the fast-forward than you would if you were doing something else, so the networks don't mind. They also know that people often will over-run into the start of their program, then have to rewind into the last commercial, which makes that last ad spot even more juicy.
To re-phrase another recent comment of mine:
There's content on TV?
They should've been less greedy and put a strict (and much lower) limit on how much advertisement they show. They would've found that people are quite willing to put up with a bit of advertisement, but not with tons of it.
Whenever I turn off AdBlock, I ask myself why people without AdBlock even use the Internet anymore.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Perfect. Then the cable companies will be forced to offer many of their more expensive channels a la carte
It's not your cable company who decides that. Your cable/dish provider has to purchase programming from the networks in packages of channels, which include stipulations about which "Service Tier" they are placed in. They DO NOT have the option to deliver them individually. Go bitch at Fox and the other content owners, the cable/dish companies have been trying to do this for years and have spent a LOT of money lobbying Congress for legislation to no effect.
and I'll no longer have to subsidize all the folks who watch networks like ESPN that I don't care about.
Actually, yes you will. If the a la carte ends up happening (not likely) the networks will just increase the price of the popular channels individually to compensate.
and it will no longer be profitable to do stupid crap like airing wrestling on the Sci-Fi channel just to bring in more ad revenue
They do that because the existing content on the SighFy has got so shitty that it's not profitable already. The pro wrestling crowd is a pretty fanatical market, they'll follow the shows to any channel. And the people who watch pro wrestling also tend to view a lot of the shows which run on Sighfy. So yes, it will still be more profitable to do this type of thing.
Funny thing is when I worked for Dish Network this was the overall goal. They wanted to do more a la carte programming but the networks wouldn't allow it. The thing is you heard the same thing from customers who would rather pay for the 5 to 10 channels that they actually watched then pay for a package with 100 channels. Customers with the all inclusive channel lineups often noted that they only purchased the package for 1 channel or they would have gone with the cheapest thing on the list. The package system is not your cable companies idea, it is the networks forcing your cable companies to include a certain set of channels and not offer certain channels in other packages. I would personally install TV again if I could purchase my locals and 5 favorites and so would so many others. Instead I am now a cable cutter. I have plenty of other options for entertainment and I really don't miss the TV so much.
You're talking about cue dots which are actually used more by the commercial providers (ITV and Channel 4), and now generally only for live programmes (i.e. with unpredictable ad break times) with regional opt-outs (i.e. where a bunch of different people need to know about the ad break starting).
If Dish's plan were to tape the broadcasts, chop out the chaff, and send you the final cut, that'd be a clear-cut case of a copyright infringing unauthorized derivative work.
So basically, you're saying that it's a clear-cut case of copyright infringement to remove the superflous interruptions that were put into a copyrighted work by the broadcaster? I would disagree.
The thing is that Cable/Satellite is actually paying Fox and other stations for being able to broadcast their channel. The original idea of cable TV was subscription based commercial free television. They started airing ads because... well... who would stop them?
It makes me hate the advertized product a little bit more each time I see an ad. Lucky for them I stopped watching tv over 10 years ago.
Tomorrow is another day...
Um, in England, on the BBC channels, there are no ads.
There are trailers for upcoming shows, but no advertising. It's one of the reasons to love the BBC.
Whether or not the entire broadcast is itself a copyrighted work, the copyrighted components from which it is assembled certainly are, so distribution of them without license would be legally sticky. If the entire broadcast is also copyrighted in itself, then you'd have two parties who could go after you for redistribution.
The alarming thing here is that Fox seems to be claiming that a totally distinct mechanism for modifying the end-user's experience of the broadcast somehow constitutes a violation of copyright. That (in addition to the clearly pernicious practical effects) would seem to open the door to absurdities like 'copyright infringement' that does not involve any copying(the machine-readable equivalent of 'skip from time w to time x and from time y to time z' is in no way even slightly like a copy of a television show...)
Here in the UK we have no adverts on BBC channels. BBC quality seems to be ok. It is true though that in the UK you have to pay an annual TV licence (approx 150 US dollars), that's how they pay for Doctor Who, the documentaries, rights to show Hollywood films (with no commercial breaks of course), and production costs for all the other programmes they make. I reckon BBC programme quality is pretty reasonable on the whole though.
I think that you should be able to skip the ads on your own device, but look at the upside for not skipping. Last week when the comercials started i left my hotel room, went to the ground floor, crossed the street, went into a supermarket, bought some ice cream, paid for it, went back to my room and didn't miss any of my show. (they are learning in germany, the comercials can be between 6 - 8 minutes at a time).
The word 'advertising' means to get people to do what they specifically do not want to do.
If it were merely to promote one viable option over another, it would be aptly named 'divertising'.
But no, the folks that twist words to promote products and services adhere to the term 'advertising' for what they do.
What kind of idiot would allow this into their home? Much less pay for it...
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
So just record the damn ads, but in a way which clearly marks them and arguably does not excessively devalue them. For instance, record the ads with heavily muted sound and video (dark, desaturated, rather quiet). Then provide a button/feature which allows skipping of dark & quiet bits; preferably a feature which is set to ON as default.
Legally satisfactory, most likely. And satisfied viewers also, most likely. Fox might be pissed off, but that's just a bonus.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
That reminded me of the 2nd episode of Charlie Brooker's "Black mirror" miniseries (recommended viewing, by the way). A future where skipping ads costs money, and looking away during an ad will only result in the ad following your gaze along the walls so that you're always looking directly at it. Closing your eyes only pauses the ad and causes a voice to remind you to "resume viewing" over and over again until you open your eyes again. A broadcaster's wet dream...
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
You see something similar on films. A cigarette burn (black circle) appears in one corner just before it's time to change reels, so the projectionist who is watching the film can go and do his job.
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When TVs start scanning viewers eyes to check ads are being watched, it's time to start marketing manequins to watch ads on your behalf!
Is there anything wroth recording on the tv these days? I mean this law suit is pointless because of this exactly. The law suit is pointless and should be dismissed also because of other argument: the most worthwhile part of the stream of garbage are commercials. Not all of them of course but it seems to me that balance of power has tilted towards commercial producers and because they have now more money they suck up most of talented people the remaining produce even more appalling garbage than before. Why watch and because of your wife and kids you cannot avoid why record stuff and waste even more time? For me they can spend even more money on lawsuits if they want. I do not give a flying f.k if they do.
I haven't owned a TV for quite a few years (cue The Onion reference), and the frequency of adverts was the main factor in abandoning it - and this is in the UK, where we see about half as much TV advertising as in the USA. My TV broke and I realised that my housemates had watched it infrequently and I hadn't watched it at all for several months, so I didn't bother replacing it.
In the last few years, I've watched quite a lot of TV shows, but all on iPlayer or on rented DVDs. Being able to watch the shows when I want, without being interrupted by adverts actually makes TV viewing enjoyable again. I would much rather pay the studios for shows (and, hopefully, therefore have them make more shows that I want to watch) than have some companies pay an intermediary to show adverts, that intermediary buy the TV shows and hope that I buy enough of the things that they're advertising to recoup the costs.
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You mean that stopped? Product placements in films make me cringe. Fortunately, they're so unsubtle that I can actively avoid the companies that buy them. Any time someone takes a drink, they need to zoom in on the bottle or can so that you can read the cocoa cola company logo, any time someone uses a computer they zoom in to the bottom of the screen so that you can read the Dell logo...
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"Yeah, good luck with that one."
Possible? Cable companies are doing this right now.
That's not the same thing as the OP was referring to.
Ever see an ad on multiple networks that don't seem to correlate? Network-wide advertising. They just broadcast their ad in place of the channel's ad.
That's somewhat how it works. There are regional or local time slots allotted in a broadcast. The local network may only replace ads in the local time slot. Program content accounts for approximately 44 minutes during a one hour run time. Local advertising slots commonly account for 2-4 minutes of the hour. The local broadcast insertion is triggered by digital signals within the network feed.
Let's think about this for a moment. If all channels become commercial-free, we'd end up paying more to the cable or satellite provider. But would that increase in spending to TV decrease our consumer habits? Does advertising intice us to spend more money, regardless of whether it's buying more expensive products or products we haven't bought before?
The downside. The big downside is this. Those of us who are low-income who aren't nearly so affected by advertising will effectively pay more to the cable or satellite company while reaping no benefits of reduced consumerism.
--
I'd worry about too many people missing commercials. Don't think they'd have no shame in putting up big ads during the actual show. And when I say ads, I even mean for other TV shows or movies. Anyone watch FX? Oh, and something that happened on Comedy Central Wednesday night. I believe it was during Comedy Central's South Park reruns they put some sort of light greyed-out ad for Tosh's new season... over the whole picture!
--
I would love to see this reach SCOTUS. I think the question is, can the cable or satellite provider aid their consumers in skipping commercials by doing it for them? Right now, with DVRs, it's the end user doing it. The question really is, can the company do it themselves? Hmmm. Maybe it's time for a new contract negotiation between the content providers and the cable and satellite companies? (It's bad enough with Comcast's Fox On Demand having fast forward disabled. Hence why I'd avoid watching Fox On Demand at all costs and stick to the TV recordings.)
If there are contract negotiations between Dish Network and the content providers, maybe they can work out a deal so they can do this hopper thing. One idea might be to charge a reasonable price for it, perhaps 25 cents per episode in order to skip commercials (for a 24 hour period for said episode). Or maybe they can offer the service for the first three episodes (regardless of channel) per month for free. Any other ideas? Oh, I bet people wouldn't hate commercials so much if they were better targeted.
Those are promotions. The BBC aren't selling anything - they want the viewers in order to justify the licence fee, not to increase the take.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
and it will no longer be profitable to do stupid crap like airing wrestling on the Sci-Fi channel just to bring in more ad revenue.
Your "stupid crap" is another man's night at the opera. What that says about those people is moot; they're out there demanding it, so why shouldn't someone shovel it?
I even heard rumours that some people will pay to watch wrestling!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
VCR's allow us to pirate movies and skip commercials with ease! Dig out your SCART leads and off we go!
The BBC aren't selling anything
I used to think that too. However, it's clear to me that you haven't been listening to BBC Radion 5Live at any point in the past month since they have been advertising Fighting Talk's Big Day Out pretty much constantly. Since this is not a free event to attend and is actually organised by the BBC, not just broadcast by them then I say yes, they certainly are selling something.
There are plenty more examples, it's just that this one is currently getting on my nerves the most.
Burns: We're building a casino!
McAllister: Arrr. Give me 5 minutes.
size has little to do with it... and in this case, dish is still in a lose-lose situation.
replaytv did not have programming those suing them could yank off their service. fox and other networks can not only sue but also pull programming off dish, which would cause a mass migration to competitors... and consumers tend to blame who they pay --- the cable or sat company -- never the network, in programming disputes that disrupt programming availability.
drop the feature or lose the programming, dish is screwed either way... then they lose or settle the lawsuit and are screwed even more... even though the feature is optional and is what customers want...
automated commercial skipping is what doomed replaytv.. it is what will doom this feature in the end unless dish and each network (and every local affiliate) reach a deal to support the feature --- even though the viewer has the choice of recording regular local channels (with commercials) or enabling the 'primetime anytime' feature (no commercials and keeps the dvr's tuners available for other recordings during primetime)
dish does it this way because it doesn't need to put 4 more tuners in each unit, and it only requires one feed from each network be recorded, edited, compressed, and sent to compatible receivers each day... otherwise they'd have to record every single local broadcast network in every local market (there's ~ 200 of them).. and not edit the commercials out.. which would require 300x more data to be uplinked just to support this feature... and because the 'hopper' dvr's actually only have two tuners in them, the feature cannot be supported in the local hardware it has to be done by dish.
networks and broadcast stations aren't all innocent here either.. if networks had 8 minutes of commercials per hour like they did a generation ago, instead of the 20 minutes or more they do today -- and didn't blast the perceived volume of them -- this wouldn't be an issue at all.
Nice to see I'm not the only one that hates those God damned overlays. I have seen several mystery shows over at my parents where that damned thing hid an important clue which made the whole fucking show pointless! There they are pointing and talking about something that I'm fucking having to guess at because some big ass logo is blocking a huge chunk of the bottom right corner. it is so bad on some channels i actually have to warn my older customers about LCD burn in because if they have one or two channels they watch that damned logo is on there so damned much the thing will burn right into the set...fuck you! damned advert bullshit!
This is why I can't say a damned word about anyone just pirating a show because i have no doubt they'll ruin the web TV soon just as badly as they ruin regular and cable. First regular was okay, then it became so many ads you couldn't build any tension or follow the story so you moved to cable, then cable became all overlays and even more ads than some OTA programming so we went to the web, now i have no doubt they'll shit ads all over the web as well. its like these ass clowns just won't be happy until every show is so fucking ruined by ads nobody will watch the thing. this is one of the reasons i have started watching web originals, as i can actually get a STORY, imagine that, a story without constant fucking stupid as hell dumb shit ads playing over and over AND OVER until you want to puke!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
It may be quite a few years since I've watched any BBC channels, but they don't have ad breaks. Paid for by the license fee, dontcha know.
Way back in the 'olden days', I bought my first stereo in 1975, $270 was a lot of cash back then* but it was a top shelf system in its day and I was 15. It had a feature that allowed you to skip pre-selected tracks on a casset. There were no ads on the tapes to skip, but automatically skipping content you don't want to listen to is conceptually the same thing. The fact that it didn't work on 9 out of 10 cassets and was slow as cold treacle is beside the point.
:)
* - Proud to say I got every cent of that pumping gas after school for $1.20/hr. Sorry to say the old valve driven chunk of furniture I had rescued from the hard rubbish and repaired went back to where I found it. ( it had to go to make room for the fuck off headphones.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
That's not how advertising works. there have been numerous studies into the effectiveness of advertising - generally all stating that it works
On the other hand, most of these studies were likely done by advertising companies/marketing divisions who stand to profit in people believing they are effective.
Overall i'd say the evidence points towards advertising having an effect.
Human beings are amazingly suggestible. Hypnosis works, I know this from direct personal experience from both perspectives (being hypnotised and hypnotising).
Since my experiences with hypnosis I've come to strongly believe that advertising uses methods which would be useful in putting someone into a suggestible state.
For a while we experimented with methods to block hypnosis; to plant post-hypnotic suggestions which would make it hard for the subject to be hypnotised without proper 'authorisation'. These subjects started to react very badly to many forms of advertising; the advertising was triggering the anti-hypnosis blocks.
Hypnosis definitely works and I'd say *therefore* advertising definitely works.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Free-to-air is actually a government mandate. Trust me, if the government didn't force them to transmit them, none of the stations would.
Very few commercially available DVR systems have a skip function, usually only a fast forward function which is very irritating to use.. I'm sure this is down to pressure from operators rather than any technical reasons.
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I am reminded by Sol Hadden from the novel Contact. He invented a chip that would make the TV change the channel during commercial breaks. He was sued but his defense was that in a free market capitalism, surely he had the right to invent something like it.
We all knew this was coming. It is not a hard argument to make that skipping commercials is basically equivalent to pirating content.
Absolute bullshit. You might as well try to argue that if you walk past a busker without throwing some change, you are stealing his livelihood. If you want to put your program over the airwaves, that is your problem. You find the money for it. I might throw you a dollar or two, or I might not, it's not my problem that you want to make a living that way. The people who work real jobs and actually watch your programs don't make a fucking tenth of what an average actor does.
In Australia, Tivo disabled the 30-second-skip voluntarily to avoid conflict with broadcasters. Via a software update no less, pulling the functionality even from deployed units via mandated updates. This was long before Sony more infamously pulled the same stunt with OtherOS.
Erm, they have adverts on their website.
I live in the UK, work in the UK, pay BBC licence tax and I'm currently seeing adverts as the company internet proxy is in Germany. It's a disgusting practice. Heaven forbid they'd let me type in my licence number, provide my passport number, biometric data...
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
"destroying the fundamental underpinnings of the broadcast television ecosystem"
Popcorn time is here. This would be a great feat.
My wife. She actually believes they are informing her of new products on the market. If there's an advert for "salty,sugary, causes-instant-death, crunchy toffee bread", it'll be in our food cupboard a week later.
I know. Divorce is the only option.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
If this is illegal, what the fuck is a DVR?
Cos, y'know, my Comcast supplied DVR doesn't have a Fast Forward button.
In all seriousness, though, Fox is a fucker and 3 quarters. Any show I watch OnDemand from another channel lets me fast forward anywhere. Fox has Comcast lock down the ability to fast forward in OnDemand shows from Fox, as well as to pick up where you left off if you chose to stop the show as opposed to pausing it for a few minutes, and go do something else. I discovered this wonderful little feature while trying to catch up on Terra Nova. It nearly caused me to stop watching the show in the beginning, which would have been a sad mistake. I expect little things like this are why amazing shows like Firefly died on Fox as well. It's not that they can't provide quality entertainment. They just don't give a fuck about it and would rather make as much money as they can exploit from their viewers.
Going to the toilet, or getting up to get a drink/snack is also a common way to circumvent commercials...
I can understand commercials as a way to fund free-to-air channels, what i hate are subscription services which also have commercials... If i already paid for it, i don't want to pay again by watching commercials!
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Yes BBC sells retail products, usually in the form of DVD's, books and audio tapes. The ABC and SBS here in Australia are modeled after the BBC and have a chain of ABC shops (we dropped the antiquated licensing paperwork decades ago and gave it a proper budget). The stuff they sell is quality viewing, someone bought me Attenborough's "Planet Earth" box set as a gift recently and I have other stuff of theirs such as the "Yes minister" series. The difference with the ABC selling themselves is that, the breaks are shorter than commercial stations, they do it the "old fashioned way", between shows, not 5min of ads 3min before the show ends. They funnel the money to people like Attenbourough, and finally - I'm actually interested in some of them.
Matter of fact I think the BBC model is a prime example of what a "public service" should be; efficient, accurate, non-partisan, and trustworthy. That they are entertaining, informative, and have used "unfair competition" to make Rupert cry, is a delightful bonus.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I don't see the legal issue with it, but certainly if everyone starts using such a service then advertisers will see no value in it and abandon free-to-air and it will die leaving only paid services.
If this hasn't been a problem with VCR and DVR, why will this be a problem now? Do you really think everyone will now start doing what they failed to do until now?
I cannot use the vast majority of those streaming tv services because:
1, they refuse to serve me content because of where i live
2, they refuse to serve me content in a format i can play
3, they refuse to let me download it at night and watch it later (i have bandwidth caps during the hours when i might want to watch tv)
TV here isn't quite as bad as it was in the us, but we still have lots of commercials...
But welcome to capitalism, greed ensures that they will always try to push customers as far as they can... this has resulted in increased prices and increased commercials over time, and it will only get worse until not only are their actions noticeably decreasing profits, but they can't find any consumer hostile way of keeping you locked in... Actually improving the service will be the absolute last resort.
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It's worth noting that in open source software like myth, you get commercial detection and skipping etc...
In commercially produced devices, especially the big brands, you just get fast forward (which is quite awkward to use for skipping ads), no skipping, no commercial detection.
Same with video players, one of the most useful features in mplayer is skip, very few other video players seem to have this.
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Product placements are an interesting one, if done in a subtle way it actually improves the program... Someone drinking a coke is more realistic than someone drinking a generic cola brand that has been fabricated specifically for the show.
But when done poorly as you mention, with the ridiculous zooming in and holding the product up to the camera in a way that you would never do if you were just using it normally really messes with the show.
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I watch a lot of my TV from torrents (I do have Netflix and a cable TV subscription, but being in Ireland, I usually miss much of the US TV by either a day (Game of Thrones) a week (NCIS) or a year (Castle, Bones).
Recently I was sitting with the wife and was watching an old movie that just happened to be on the cable tv, and I got quite a shock when I saw an add. I think you had a greater effect from those set of adds because you hadn't seen them in such a long time, like me. As the saying goes, "Absence makes the heart grow fonder."
Well, except for constant ads for their own programs/BBC radio/Red nose day etc...
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
Good ads are subtle, you arent paying much attention but they go in subconsciously... Then when your going to buy that kind of product, you lean towards the one you saw advertised or you think of it first.
On the other hand i detest ads which are in your face, if they annoy me sufficiently then i will certainly remember but in a bad way and i will explicitly avoid their products in future as well as telling other people to do the same.
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You date back a bit farther than me. I think when I entered the workforce, the min. wage was $2.50. Instead of 'Fast Forward', it was 'Fast Food' for me..lol
Just because you watch ads, doesn't mean you're actually going to buy the products featured in them.
If i am subjected to ads which are too pushy, irritating or frequent i will go out of my way to avoid the product in question and most likely the company making it... I have actively sought out alternatives many times when the supplier i knew of was one that has irritated me through commercials.
Similarly, i now browse with an adblocker... Text ads i had no problem with, neither most graphical banners...
Animated ads started to annoy me, but ads with sound were the final straw... The amount of times my computer would start making a noise and i had to hunt through 50+ browser tabs to find the source.
Ads which delay page loading also irritate me severely, and banner ads where the size is not pre-declared in the html so the page reformats itself as the images load.
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...why not Fox? The legal theory behind the Fox suit is not without precedent -- I will go out on a limb, here, and predict that this suit will run pretty much the same course as a similar suit successfully filed by the RIAA many, many years ago. A compliant judge could be convinced that hardware makers who include a skip capability must compensate the content providers, in the same way the RIAA convinced other compliant judges that the makers of blank recording media must fork over a portion of their sales to the RIAA, even if the blank media is never used to record content produced by the RIAA's clients. At least, if I were a lawyer for Fox, that is what I'd be trying to do. In our precedent-saturated legal system in the US, if it worked once, it will probably work again.
Very few commercially available DVR systems have a skip function, ... I'm sure this is down to pressure from operators rather than any technical reasons.
My Comcast cable box (Motorola, I think) has this feature. The Comcast Remote has no button to activate it. I discovered the feature when I bought a Logitech Harmony remote which has buttons to skip forward 30 s and back 15 s. (I think, haven't actually timed it.)
I wonder if anything interesting is going to happen with the Moto STB now that it is owned by Google. I know that cable companies do not want a more capable box but perhaps Google could market a better one directly to consumers.
Be real, who watches ads? Even when watching the few shows I watch religiously every week, where my eyes are glued to the screen during the show, I hardly notice the ads, let alone could tell you which ads I just saw or even come up with some kind of detail, or what product they tried to cram down my throat.
And I'm hardly special in this way. Try it. Go watch TV with your pals, don't tell them before and then, after the show, ask them to come up with five commercial they just saw and offer them 10 bucks if they succeed.
I betcha you won't spend a dime on this experiment.
You may not remember the adds, but you saw them. Sometimes, that's all that matters. My gripe is that even if I skip past the ads, I still have to see all the giant ads they plaster over the active video of the show you're watching. It all started with channels putting their logo in the corner; now they put animated ads that are hard to ignore all over the bottom quarter of the screen. Fuckwads! When will someone come up with a system that gets rid of those nuisances?
the free market
What free market? Cable is regulated as a monopoly, as is most everything that involves digging up city-owned roads. Satellite is also regulated as a duopoly, as is most everything that involves intentional radio-frequency transmissions.
There is a third option. Don't watch it.
Not watching television at all turns one into this stereotypical character from the point of view of one's peers.
You can't accurately FF at 200x and reliably hit the show when it comes back. I guess they figure that the last 15s of the last ad are going to be enough.
Still, PVRs should be *required* to have automated commercial skip functionality. That way the ad producers would be motivated to make the commercials have no obvious, mechanically easily detectible differences from the shows themselves.
If commercial skip were a common feature, ads at 10x the volume of the show would not have been the problem that it has become.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
One of the reasons I don't have cable television anymore is that I was sick of paying for 100 channels and not being able to find anything actually interesting to watch on any of it.
I have cable for exactly two reasons: 1. When you sign up for Internet, you pay for TV too in the form of a "line fee" equal to the price of the lowest tier of cable TV. 2. Someone else in the household is an ardent fan of MSNBC's Morning Joe Brewed by Starbucks and cannot perform her morning hygiene without it. She even had me hook an FM transmitter up to the cable box so that she can listen to it in the shower.
Very few commercially available DVR systems have a skip function, usually only a fast forward function which is very irritating to use.. I'm sure this is down to pressure from operators rather than any technical reasons.
I have had Dish for 5 years or so and my DVR system has a 30sec skip forward. Needless to say, that was the first button to have its label worn off.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
I'll no longer have to subsidize all the folks who watch networks like ESPN that I don't care about.
Actually, ESPN forces cable companies into an all-or-nothing situation: either all their customers pay for ESPN, or nobody gets to watch it. They are doing the same thing to ISPs, so it is not as if moving everyone onto the web will somehow help us escape this practice.
I fail to see the downside here...we'll simply be paying those fees directly to the entertainment companies
No thanks -- those are the same companies that want to kill the Internet. What we really need is to kill off the entire distribution chain, and build a new, more open system.
Palm trees and 8
I had a law-suit once, until their lawyer took an arrow to the knee...
You have to think about it realistically though. The music channels on sattelite radio are commercial free but the talk channels are not. How would you have 24hour programming with live talk without any breaks? People need to use the bathroom, prepare for the next break and just have a minute to decompress.
Sure they could play music, but if you tuned in to hear talk then music is just as bad as a commercial.
People are screaming about paying 10-20 a month on birth control and claiming that violates their reproductive rights.
How do you think people will respond if they have to start paying for network TV?
That would be ITV channels as the BBC doesn't have commercials, and the blocks are still there
http://chimpbox.us
You see something similar on films. A cigarette burn (black circle) appears in one corner just before it's time to change reels, so the projectionist who is watching the film can go and do his job.
I thought that was what the "clack-clack-clack" noise and the screen going white was for...
The BBC channels have no adverts.
Fringe is pretty good. So is Mentalist, Merlin, Castle (but that one is getting tired,) Game of Thrones, Doctor Who, Blue Bloods (though I doubt many on Slashdot would enjoy this one,) Warehouse 13, and Walking Dead.
For some reason guys, I think we should mod this dude up!
Yes, but they still waste my time and are almost as annoying. They keep on about an upcoming show so much that I start to get bored with it before it is even broadcast. This sort of crap from the BBC has increased significantly in recent years.
My wife and I decided to go with Dish (well it was mostly me) due to how quickly the extras for comcast add up. We're still going to do broadband via Comcast, but I have to say I'm pleased with the Dish setup.
By its self out of the box the Hopper can record up to 6 HD shows at a time (if I remember correctly), and also has cool little stuff like press the red rectangular button on the remote and you can see what channel/show people in the other rooms are watching so if they yell out "hey check this out!" you can just hit the button, pick the room they're in and you're watching it. You can also add extra storage to the built in 2TB hard drive via an external USB or the eSATA. There's just too much cool stuff to list vs the DirecTV setup we had at our apartment 2 years ago, or the comcast setup the in-laws have.. or heck even the dish setup they had about a year ago.
The Hopper is basically a HTPC setup done in a well thought out way.
Now having said that, I haven't tried the auto-channel skip yet. It's a sweet feature, since we're use to watching shows via Netflix, Vudu, or Amazon On Demand (or whatever they are calling it today)... occasionally Hulu Plus for the seasons they have but not Netflix. The reason Hulu is occasional is because of the damn annoying ads. I believe the auto skip is only available if you go into the settings and turn on the PrimeTime Anytime (which I haven't done), which basically records from 7 or 8 PM to 11 PM every weeknight and a slightly shifted time on Saturdays. It keeps these shows for 8 days, but you have the option to save some or all for an extended period of your choice. Also, the way I understand it, the auto-skip feature doesn't work until you watch the shows 12 or 24 hours *after* it aired.
I may have to turn this on and try this out before Fox screws everything up!
I thought wrestling was the coolest fucking thing in the world, I used to watch it incessantly back during the Hulkamania era, mid-80's to early 90's...we were poor, so I had to be content with getting copies of the Pay-per-views from friends who taped it and watching the show they had on Saturday mornings on FOX since we couldn't afford cable (Never any real matches on the show, though, which kinda sucked, all the stars just "fought" nobodies and obviously always won).
I grew out of it around when I turned 12, but I can see the appeal in it for kids. The adults, on the other hand, that I see walking around with WWE T-shirts on...that's a little sad. To a kid it's as real as can be, but in flipping through channels and seeing it as I got older, it's so ridiculously fake I just can't understand how people suspend disbelief when they get old enough to know better.
I'm pretty sure we are going to see techniques which will mean you can't even "not be present" for the adverts e.g. a click-through quiz question about the colour of the actors jumper in the advert before your broadcast would continue.
n/t
You don't NEED a license. Therefore how can what YOU do "[depend] ann the license agreement between the producer/aggregator of the content (single or multiple pieces of work doesn't matter) and the distributor."?
If it's based on copyright laws, then it's no crime and you have to show damage as a tort.
Damages: Nil.
If they subscribe to cable then they have already been doing that for decades.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
You have to wonder what advertising actually costs the economy, and the planet.
Apart from the vast industry it is, employing people, some quite able, who could be employed doing more useful things, there is the cost of people's time having to wait through adverts to see a TV show. I usually record TV films on VCR and skip the adverts when I view later, but I notice that in a 2 hour film there is at least 30 minutes of adverts on some of the UK minor channels. Multiply the value of that time by millions of people.
Before anyone says it is essential for the economy, most adverts aim at robbing Peter to pay Paul. Thus I see an advert for Ford cars, then a few minutes later one for VW, then one for Audi. Cancelling each other out in fact.
Or they are trying to persuade people to buy things they don't need, like a new kitchen, ripping out the old one for landfill, just because the new kitchen advert featured self-closing drawer or some such gimmick.
Personally, seeing something in a patronising advert makes me put a black mark against it. I have seen adverts for the car that I drive that are so silly it makes me feel ashamed to be seen in it next day.
I had a VCR with commercial skip built into it and it worked pretty damn good. I dont believe RCA got sued.
Awww too bad so sad for them. Customers will do it anyway, and since we've been doing it for over 20 years (yes, initially it was from a vcr, then the dvr) they don't have a leg to stand on.
Your honor, our customers have been happily skipping their commercials for 20 years, and they just *now* complain???
WTF? Seriously?
And Fox got the short straw.
This is not about licenses or revenue or anything else, this is about 'broadcasters' (seriously, who calls themselves that now days) standing in front of fleeing ad revenue and shouting "Look! We're doing everything we can to stop people from skipping your stupid content, but if we dumb-down the shows any more people will be brain-dead before the first commercial. Find a better way to advertise your crap."
Without seeing the contract under which Fox provides its programming to Dish, there's no way of knowing whether Dish is violating the contract. And if they are violating the terms of the contract, they probably ARE infringing Fox's contract. Anybody think they'll get a judgment in proportion to what music file-sharers get?
Print this comment out and stick it near your monitor.
I must learn the difference between:
your versus you're
there versus their versus they're
lose versus loose
plurals versus plural's
They set their price levels based on what they can get people to pay, not what it costs them.
get up and do something productive when commercials came on until I took an arrow to the knee.
Budweiser get counter-sued for not actually selling beer. It turns out to be carbonated grey water meant for the sprinkler systems of office buildings.
My dream scenario would be the judge announcing that he's taking a judging job in South Africa (Like the Monty Python Bit) and sentencing them both to death!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Those trailer breaks are likely where the commercials get inserted when the shows air on BBC America/Canada.
Just an aside to the folks for whom the Miracle Prostate Supplement commercial sounded like you; if you have to go to the bathroom every few minutes you might want to get that thing looked at. Otherwise you might not have to worry about where to put all your gold for too much longer...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
It could be worse, like a DJ trampling over the vocals of a song with a voice over. Seems pretty common in Europe from what I've heard.
A couple weeks ago I happened to plug my cable into my TV to see what would happen. Apparently with the cable internet and phone I have, they aren't able to filter out the TV signal.
I was extra tired last night so I spent essentially the entire evening watching cable, for the first time in almost a decade. I couldn't tell you one ad that was on last night. In fact, my GF would occasionally comment on an ad immediately after it aired, and I would have absolutely no idea what she was talking about. My internal adblock seems to be functioning pretty well.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
"destroying the fundamental underpinnings of the broadcast television ecosystem."
We can only hope.
Doing so would certainly satisfy the Copyright Clause of the US Constitution:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to
Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
I can think of few better ways to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" than "destroying the ... broadcast television ecosystem."
-- Fox claims that giving viewers the ability to skip commercials on recorded television shows demonstrates the "clear goal of violating copyrights and destroying the fundamental underpinnings of the broadcast television ecosystem."
So is Fox then claiming it owns the copyrights of the commercials it broadcasts?
Basically we have a bunch of suits who have no idea how stupid they sound...
You think they sound stupid, but you forget how stupid the law actually is. They're likely to prevail simply because they are the bigger bunch of suits. This is America after all.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Isn't it? Removing the double-negative from "no non-infringing use" reads to me as "infringing use". Not being sarcastic, just trying to see the part I missed here.
I'm surprised people still watch it at all, personally.
U Mad Bro?
Hahahahahaha.
Obviously it's silly to sue someone over this tech, however, if users reduce the value of advertising on television by not watching them then these lost revs will have to be made up elsewhere. And that will likely translate to more direct costs to the user.
"Users reducing the value of advertising on television" should send a very clear message to the companies that provide us their service. They (the providers - Fox, CNN, Comcast, etc.) are behaving as if their service were a required necessity of life and any tampering would undoubtedly destroy us all. Their services are *not* required, nor are they necessary. People need only to wake up and realize that they don't need these things which we have been programmed to believe we need.
I am SURE the Dinosaurs would have been happy to sue their way to species survival, too. I am pretty sure that would not be in the best interest of Homeland Defense, yes?
Adapt or Die. You expect me to as the job environment changes, and feel no sympathy. Why is there shock that I feel none for them?
"no use"
I watched the first episode and thought it was horrible, but so many people are excited about this series, what does it compare to, maybe I will start watching it again.
This is the sig that says NI (again)
I dont own a tv. I went to the US for christmas and I flipped it on. I believe i saw the same 6 commericals for 4 hours of television.
Does no one else find alot of the current thoughtless repetative commerical programming insulting? how do people actually WATCH tv? 18 minutes of a 30 muinute program is 12min for commericals, your PAYING to watch commericals? What the &^@$ ?
Ill continue to pirate television and inform people how to do so for the sake o, well, collective human intelligence. I cant stand idle while people think they are forced to be subjected to this kind of dumbing torture.
Giants like Fox this have commandeered our airwaves and the only way to fight them is totally ignore them.
Turn off your TV.
Then the Gaffer Tape will become the new fetish online.
I wish I was kidding.
This is the sig that says NI (again)
I didn't say it was right I just said it wasn't a hard argument to make. Of course it will probably come down to whether the consumer (whether that is considered the end user or DISH Network) is held to any contractual obligation not to alter content. Even then it would only affect pay-for TV as OTA has no contract to agree to.
"... destroying the fundamental underpinnings of the broadcast television ecosystem."
Is there anything wrong with doing that?
Is there any law that specifically prohibits doing that?
From a public policy perspective, I don't see any problem here.
This will probably sound a bit cliche, but it compares to nothing else. Television has never known a show like it.
I'll give it another chance then, thanks for responding :)
This is the sig that says NI (again)
I only have one data point for this, but my one adult friend who was really into wrestling said he enjoyed it at a meta-level for the scripting. He knew the wrestling was fake, but he liked how they put together the drama, all the twists and turns and betrayals, etc.
For what it's worth, I still don't understand how that could make it watchable, but he was a pretty smart guy and seemed to be getting something out of it.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
Syfy airs wrestling because it gets the highest rating of any show on their network. It did so for more than 80 weeks in a row.
If you want them to air science fiction, then get people to watch science fiction. Otherwise, they get rasslin'.
I have a Dish DVR for a few years, the non hopper version, and it has had a normal FF and a 30 second button. The downside is you usually end up past commercials and then have to hop back and watch the last commercial or FF through that. It really is easier to just nab things online with the cappers nicely removing all commercials than FFing. FOX's lawsuit is just encouraging piracy. Since Fox corporate has a history of pirating phone messages maybe it's a given they're pro-piracy.
I watch only over-the-air, mostly the PBS Newshour, Nature, NOVA, Masterpiece series. I do not think these will go away. I try to make sure by funding them
I do not have a problem paying for content. But last time I checked cable and dish had commercial breaks while also had a usage fee. That makes no sense to me.
I would welcome an internet based and fan supported distribution model financed through micropayments. Fox et al. can go the way of the dodo as far as I am concerned. The content produced by studios would survive, in fact cutting out the middleman should benefit them as well.
if I rver saw one! Fox charges Dish for carrying their broadcast. Customers pay for Dish. Satellite and Cable TV should have been comercial free from the beginning! I can sorta see over the air broadcasts containing commercials, though they need to be limited no no more than 6 minutes per hour.
Stations that want to be carried on cable or sattelite need to provide commercial free feeds. Satellite or cable tv with commercials is like putting commercials in Netflix (or Hulu Plus, or Blockbuster) streaming content. People wouldn't stand for that, so why pay far too much more for cable or satellite with commercials?!
One of the main reasons that I dropped cable TV for DVDs and a Roku was the commercials. That and the lack of quality content, and the extreme price gouging by Mediacom (the only cable tv and cable internet provider here!)
Cable Internet (along with electricity, gas, water and landline phone service) need to be made non-proffit public utilities, customers only paying the actual cost od delivering the service.
Replay TV didn't lose, they ran out of money before they could defend themselves: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReplayTV#Legal_battle
"The lawsuit against SONICblue was stayed when the company filed for bankruptcy protection in March 2003"
It has not been tested in court. The broadcasters are terrified of another major loss like the Cablevision lawsuit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_storage_digital_video_recorder#Cablevision_litigation_in_the_U.S.
Where the US court system found remove-DVRs (and DVRing) fully protected under US law.
Not only that, some VCR remotes had a button specifically designed to make it easy to skip commercials: each press skipped by forward 30 seconds.
Dish Network has had exactly this same button on their DVR remotes for at least the last 4-5 years. In fact, I believe it is unique to them and a (minor) selling point in their marketing material. This technology (skipping ads) is only slightly different, but I think fundamentally so, in that it is specifically targeting a type of material as opposed to simply skipping ahead a fixed amount of time.
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
Does anyone have any information how this works? I have a Hopper, and the last thing I recorded had commercials. Is it something to be enabled in the settings, does it happen automatically, or is there a button to hit to do it like the 30 second skip? I can't find anything when poking around the device, and googling it only brings up the lawsuit for me.
I hear ya. Same for Satellite radio. Bought my first new car with one two months back and I was quite surprised to hear commercials on the non-native channels (Fox, CNN, etc).
Why would that surprise you? What did you expect, dead air? If they are rebroadcasting a channel that broadcasts 24 hours a day with commercials, it's awfully hard to fill 24 hours by skipping those commercials.
If this is illegal, what the fuck is a DVR? What the fuck is a VCR? Both can be used to circumvent commercials.
I suspect they see a difference between the fact that they can't stop YOU from doing anything (hitting fast forward, hitting mute, walking out of the room, singing at the top of your lungs with your fingers stuck in your ears) with a rebroadcaster removing the ads automatically. You can take an action, they would like to think Dish cannot take that action for you automatically.
Personally, I don't want to see all ads removed. They are just going to raise rates to cover it. This is one time where status quo is better for me than the alternative.
Did you have anything on topic to talk about, or just this? That said... I always wanted to see Barry Horowitz win.
Were they products you actually cared about?
All I remember seeing were
a) Car ads (I'm not shopping for a car)
b) Intimate product ads, many targetted at an older demographic (I don't need viagra or KY, thanks)
c) Feminine hygiene products (not a woman, and my fiancee doesn't have hygiene issues)
d) A bunch of sh*t that was our of my region. Not going to drive 4000km to hit Red Lobster or some car dealership
e) Some upcoming movies or games etc
The latter was the only one that might slightly interest me, and none of it was new. They *all* tended to repeat the same ads several times through a show, making me much more pissed off than interested.
Seriously, if they want to advertise viagra and KY, better to try and get ads at the local pharmacy than on the tube. You'll catch more people who are interested and physically present.
I'd watch ads if they weren't so obnoxiously intrusive to the program I'm trying to watch. I've quit TV over Ads, and now watch exclusively HULU and Netflix. The last straw for me was watching a show, don't remember which, and having a three minute commercial, followed by four minutes of program followed by five minutes of commercial ... I kid you not. When a 1/2 hour show is really only about 14.5 minutes long (time it, not counting intro and ending credits), you spend more time NOT watching the program than actually watching it. My time is worth more to me than being peppered with stupid ads, commercials for crappy shows (while they cancel every good show I like). I mean Jersey Shore is going on what ... 8 season now, but the cancel Firefly after two? No thanks, I'll pass.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Be real, who watches ads?
My in-laws. No, seriously, they watch the ads. They have a DVR so they can record and time shift shows to watch later and watch the ads while playing back the recording. When asked why they're watching the ads on a recording my mother-in-law stated that they had a moral obligation to the networks to watch the ads. I chide you not!!! They also insist on watching shows like Dancing With the Stars(1) live so they can see the 'action' as it happens. Start the recording then begin watching 15 minutes later so you can skip commercials and still find out the 'winner' in live mode? No way Jose, that would mean reneging on your moral obligation to the show's sponsors.
Except with visiting my in-laws, I've seen very few commercials in the last decade+. If I could get them to make good use of their DVR, my commercial viewing would drop about 90%. If others would follow suit, Fox & co would have to learn to live on the $3-4/month they get from every cable/satellite TV provider for every subscriber.
(1) Maybe I could have just said they watch shows like this and been done with pointing out the type of people that watch commercials....
I found instructions online for how to remap an unused button on the Motorola cable box/DVR remote that Comcast provided to add a button for the "skip forward 30 seconds" action. It's pretty nice, and it's pretty appalling that they don't provide that control natively.
I can tell that Fox is desperate because they site copyright violation in their lawsuit over skipping ads. I don't see any connection between the two, they're throwing whatever shit they have at the wall to see what sticks.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Er...BBC doesn't have adverts. Never has, hopefully never will.
BBC America does indeed have adverts. Mostly for booze.
And censorship, of course - can't have Americans subjected to words they don't even understand (like twat or chav), or exposed to nipples or penises, even if presented by Sir David Attenborough.
--
The big problem with pornography is defining it. You can't just say it's pictures of people naked. For example, you have these primitive African tribes that exist by chasing the wildebeest on foot, and they have to go around largely naked, because, as the old tribal saying goes: "N'wam k'honi soit qui mali," which means, "If you think you can catch a wildebeest in this climate and wear clothes at the same time, then I have some beach front property in the desert region of Northern Mali that you may be interested in."
So it's not considered pornographic when National Geographic publishes color photographs of these people hunting the wildebeest naked, or pounding one rock onto another rock for some primitive reason naked, or whatever. But if National Geographic were to publish an article entitled "The Girls of the California Junior College System Hunt the Wildebeest Naked," some people would call it pornography. But others would not. And still others, such as the Spectacularly Rev. Jerry Falwell, would get upset about seeing the wildebeest naked.
-- Dave Barry, "Pornography"
This particular feature has no non-infringing use.
How exactly is a copyright infringed upon when I choose to fast forward through a commercial?
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
THANK YOU. The point of advertising revenue was to pay for BROADCAST TV. There are no fees for BROADCAST TV. BROADCAST TV is FREE. But Cable, Satellite, FIOS, those have fees. The networks get paid from those fees. So the networks are double dipping.
We've already paid for the damn thing. No fuck off!
FOX is suing because they will lose the audience that their SuperPAC buddies have paid them, to have "paid-advertising"
on the network. This DISH tool bypasses that - and guess what - THAT"S AWESOME!
Once people wake up and realize how pervasive the problems are with unlimited funds and money from hidden donors really is - it'll only force the issue back to the Supreme Court sometime down the road.
The players behind FOX (news) are shady, dastardly, evil, gluttons who'll do anything to propagate their species - similar to the KKK
if you think about it. They're desperate and their main-audience is anyone who watches their slobbering newscasts.
Go DISH and anyone else that has these tools - meanwhile us geeks will continue to edit our home media streams, stripping them free of ANY and ALL commercials for uninterrupted playback anytime we wish.
Love technology!
They already charge high fees - see ESPN. We are subsidizing network programming. Just let networks try and over charge - see how fast people drop cable or how quickly ala cart becomes a reality!
So I guess when I mute the commercials and switch to a flashback channel then I'm in violation of the law. I think it is TOTALLY OUTRAGEOUS that cable companies charge for the service to viewers when they are already getting paid by the advertisers. I believe it's called DOUBLE DIPPING. So as far as i am concerned we should have the right to skip commercials, since we are paying for the service it should be free from commercials. Oh yeah and what about all of the companies with DVR service and you record shows to watch back later you FF right through the commercials. Im Just Sayin
Not just is it the same commercials over and over, but they're all OBVIOUS scams. Sirius is complicit in fraud, as far as I'm concerned. With all the damn "do you want EXPLOSIVE power in bed?" "do you want to pay off your mortgage in 2 days?" "you can make $100,000 a year buying and selling property with my system" ads, I'm trying to figure out who exactly is the target audience.
My DirecTV remote has that button.
...demonstrates the "clear goal of violating copyrights..."
Wait, so now not watching something is a violation of copyrights? Before they bitched and moaned when people watched things without permission.
I so confused...
I believe you are correct. I can't bother to look for a source but I remember there was a lawsuit over this feature.
The downside is channels like SciFi will no longer exist. Of course, neither will the Golf Channel, or EWTN and that might be a good thing.
The far, far bigger downside will be with consumers paying directly for programming they will be faced with a decision every month (at least!) of "is this channel worth it?" Today, these costs are hidden whereas with this model it will be clear and obvious - and most channels will fail the "worth it" test. End result? There will be far, far fewer channels if any are left at all. HBO will remain because it is already passing the "worth it" test every month for every viewer that gets it. But virtually nothing else is going to make it.
Sure, you might be willing to subsidize the SciFi channel, but just about everyone else will not. Same thing goes for the Golf Channel - where there might be hundreds of people that would easily plunk down $20 a month to receive it, that isn't enough people by far. So it dies. ESPN? They might survive, but it will be a near thing.
A far bigger question is sports in general. Today what pays for the entire college sports program, everything from golf to swimming to polo? Football television revenue. Wipe out the advertising there and there is no more television revenue or certainly not anywhere near what it is today. So most colleges will fold up their sports programs, all of them, simply for lack of funds. Was someone thinking of building a billion-dollar sports palace for a pro sports team? Ha. Without television revenue, which all comes from ads, there will be no more huge sports palaces. There will not be million-dollar contracts for NFL players either. So ESPN might survive, but there will be virtually nothing to show on it. Bye-bye ESPN.
No, without advertising revenue you are looking at a signficant remaking of American society in ways you cannot imagine. I can't either - it is too sweeping a change with television ad revenue sponsoring or supporting so many different aspects. Were this to change - and I really doubt it will - the changes will affect every single person in the country, probably in a negative manner.
True, they won't remember the commercials themselves. But ask your pals to chose between two similar products, one having been advertised and the other not, and most of the time they will choose the product that was advertised. Especially if they can't remember the ad. It's been studied extensively.
Fox claims that giving viewers the ability to skip commercials on recorded television shows demonstrates the "clear goal of violating copyrights and destroying the fundamental underpinnings of the broadcast television ecosystem."
Ah yes, the old "technology represents a threat to our antiquated business model" argument.
Also, I'd be interested to hear the logic connecting ad skipping with copyright violation.
With internet lines directly to people's TV / tablets / phones a producer of a show does not need a TV network. They just need a vendor like Apple/Google/Netflix/Amazon to stream it to the user. Those are your new big 4 "networks" right there.
I think you mean "Max Headroom".
It is far more likely that it would still exist, but would air more reruns and less new content. I wouldn't expect the older sci-fi reruns to be significantly more expensive than any other old TV show or movie, and it doesn't take a big audience to make airing such content profitable.
In fact, if Sci-Fi (I refuse to call it SyFy) aired a wider variety of older content, I think it might attract a wider audience. Its biggest problem is that it doesn't have a lot of variety, focuses too much on what I would argue crosses the line into horror, and generally isn't interesting to the average viewer, even among people who enjoy science fiction.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
There are 4 people (aged from mid-30 to early 60s) in one of my D&D groups who are very into wresting for what sound like the same reasons - the characters and storylines.
Just like it's been proven time and again that I can tell you when there's a speed trap ahead on the road, I can tell you when a commercial is about to begin.
That and me telling you when the coast is clear or the commercial has ended completes the loop, but the conveyance of all that type of information is protected by Freedom of Speech under the US Constitution.
And that's the way I would defend it in court.
We should start referring to processes which run in the background by their correct technical name... paenguins.
The commercial skip is available the next day, and only on the small, well-defined set that is primetime network shows, so I assume Dish simply analyzes the show and sends the commercial start/end frame #'s down to the STBs. So we have yet another case of "illegal numbers" like the DeCSS episode.
What would be interesting is if the STBs were flexible enough to allow peer-to-peer download of commercial frame #'s. Then bored IT nerds could be posting commercial times 30 seconds after a show ended. What would the networks do about that?
Personally I use Windows Media Center and comskip, so all my commercials are skipped automatically, but this is not a regular-Joe type of solution.
In a truly free market, commercial marking would be allowed, but then the networks would simply:
A. switch the advertising to be "in show" with crawls, pop-in graphics in the corners, etc.
or
B. pay per episode with only short ads like Hulu does ("This episode of CSI is brought to you by Acme Metal Detectors")
how is not viewing braking copyright,
IIRC, the companies did try and sue to the VCR makers to remove the FF button, and the record button
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
"It should not surprise anyone, the MPAA and RIAA are communists so are Networks."
They're what now? Put down the pipe dude, they are certainly NOT communists.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
It's disabled by default in the US too, but there's a key combination you can enter into the remote that enables it again.
Unix is user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.
The one I really hate is when every radio station in the country gets a version of the song with their station name dubbed in, usually with a reference the the nearest big city somewhere. Country songs seem to be the worst about it. "Kickin' up dust in mah pickup truck, blastin' tunes from [WKRP]. Thinkin' of a sweet boy I left behind in [CINCINNATTI]." Unbearably insulting.
Whatever you do, don't blink while looking at copyrighted materials... oh fuck, I have some books in front of me and I just blinked. I just did it again! Now I'm looking at a computer monitor instead. I am soooooo fucked for copyright infringement.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
A suitable suit suite? Sweet!
Unix is user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.
"No, there is no other solution. We're not stupid, and we can go elsewhere."
Oh, but that's where you are wrong. We are quite demonstrably stupid, and there is nowhere else to go.
Now sit down, shut up, and let them rent you out to the highest bidder like you're supposed to.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
I hate overlays too, but...
I have seen several mystery shows over at my parents where that damned thing hid an important clue which made the whole fucking show pointless! There they are pointing and talking about something that I'm fucking having to guess at because some big ass logo is blocking a huge chunk of the bottom right corner.
No you haven't. Making shit up just weakens your premise.
> destroying the fundamental underpinnings of the broadcast television ecosystem
They are, of course, correct. The real question is, "Is it legal or proper for them to stop it through courts?"
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
True, but we were talking about network tv.
It is amazing how many people have subsidized cable, though.
They could try making the commercials more interesting (or at least less insulting). Perhaps if they would quit shouting people would quit shooshing.
Damnit, when our commercials come on that toilet lid had BETTER close and lock. If people want to pee, let'em do it during the show.
Exactly
It is not like they provide something essential to your survival or anything. Find a new use for your time. Period.
May Peace Prevail On Earth
That was ITV/Channel 4 - they still have them I think. As another poster mentioned, the BBC does not have ads
Keep in mind that there are season long (and even multi-season) story arcs. Things are often presented in one episode, and explained in a flashback sequence in another episode. The first one is largely character intro stuff. Give it about three or four episodes.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
completely off topic because Fox is no getting any money from your cable provider that could pay for the programming, and this complaint is about a feature that turns the screen black and k skips thecommercials, the user doesn't even have the opportunity to see if he would like to not watch the commercial. it's a systemic way to block out the ads, not an individual walking out of the room during a single break
cut to commercial, bloop bloop bloop (30 sec skip) and back to your show.
Whether or not the entire broadcast is itself a copyrighted work, the copyrighted components from which it is assembled certainly are, so distribution of them without license would be legally sticky. If the entire broadcast is also copyrighted in itself, then you'd have two parties who could go after you for redistribution.
Well, DISH does have a license to PVR and rebroadcast on demand, otherwise FOX and the others would be going after them for that service. However, the lawsuit is about the AdHop specifically. The only way I can see that as a copyright violation is if the entire video stream is considered copyrighted. Under those circumstances, a commercial skipped presentation might be considered to be a derivative work, and thus a violation of copyright. However, if the stream is not copyrighted, then presentation of only component of it (the show) should not be a copyright violation.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I don't normally answer ACs but apparently you don't watch the detective shows. CSI Miami is the worst for this one, where Horatio will spot a clue in a corner and make one of his little sarcastic comments while bagging it which depending on the station you may not be able to see thanks to the BIG ASS LOGO that blocks it. USA is the worst in this regard as they will sometimes take the entire bottom 20% of the screen when they are plugging one of their shows.
So don't call someone a liar unless you actually watch the programs, otherwise it just makes you look like a douche.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
These "promotions" are highly annoying, overlays over ending credits announcing stuff I know is coming next (they are broadcasting EPG information) or even worse: soon, without actually giving any usefull information. Or those 60s news flashes, skip those and stop talking over other programs.
Up next: televisions that allow you to mute them or turn them off during commercials declared illegal! Also, DVRs that do not prevent you from fast-forwarding through commercials also declared illegal!
Dish Network has had exactly this same button on their DVR remotes for at least the last 4-5 years. In fact, I believe it is unique to them and a (minor) selling point in their marketing material.
Tivo has the same button.
Dish Network has had exactly this same button on their DVR remotes for at least the last 4-5 years. In fact, I believe it is unique to them and a (minor) selling point in their marketing material.
I would guess that skipping content is either legal or illegal, and the exact algorithm used for determining how much to skip is basically irrelevant.
Unix is user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.
I don't believe their ever was a ruling in the ReplayTV case. I thought the lawsuit was stayed because the company went bankrupt during the trial.
Unix is user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.
I don't think Fox have thought through the consequences of their actions. They're going all-out copyright maximalist and claiming that any alteration or omission from a copyrighted work is now breach of copyright, Just imagine, if they win then the following adjacent acts may also violate copyright due to the established precedent:
1. Any kind of censorship, cutting or shortening scenes to agree with network morals or to fit into a shorter timeslot.
2. Those annoying announcer voiceovers and ads over the top of your favourite programme.
3. Network logos.
Screw "not watching ads is stealing from the network" for its blatant insanity - these guys have been stealing from the consumer for years by ruining the works they're meant to be providing.
You can almost hear Rupert Murdoch's crypt keeper claw closing into a fist, flailing through the air as he bellows "They're taking my MONEY!!! Die, Die, die all you dirty thieves!!!
Someone needs to tell him we've been fast forwarding through his commercials for years, shut up, and stop interrupting our entertainment with your commercial sewage. Charge us to watch you channel, but for the love-o-jebus just stop crapping on your viewers.
I've been noticing this tactic for about 10 years now. There aren't any commercials in the first 15-20 minutes of the show, but as the show progresses the percentage of commercials approches 50%. It seems like they're stretching just how much you will put up with after you've been hooked. I don't think I could watch TV without MythTV's auto commercial detection any more.
SHHHH! Don't tell anyone about that! You wanna get us all sued?
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TV here isn't quite as bad as it was in the us, but we still have lots of commercials...
But welcome to capitalism, greed ensures that they will always try to push customers as far as they can... this has resulted in increased prices and increased commercials over time, and it will only get worse until not only are their actions noticeably decreasing profits, but they can't find any consumer hostile way of keeping you locked in... Actually improving the service will be the absolute last resort.
Ya know, I listen to talk radio in the car. There are some ads they run so much I can't change the channel quickly enough. Some of the more obnoxious ads I hate so much I turn the radio off. There is a point of diminishing returns on that kind of advertising. You'd think those radio and tv companies would realize that. Maybe they think they haven't reached the breaking point yet. THEY HAVE!
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I have to watch BBC America which has ads you insensitive clod!
Knowing my pals, the question they'll immediately ask is whether there is no option for the store-brand since it's usually just as good but quite a bit cheaper...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I guess where I'm confused is that the later hardware from that company did NOT have this feature - which is why I never upgraded! Perhaps this is true, I've gotten two responses saying so, but it also seems odd they pulled one of the major selling points from the new hardware when they felt they were in the right In the end the company went under fighting this, I hope that DISH has better luck although frankly I dumped them to get the TiVO DVR on Direct - and then dumped THEM when they too dumped TiVO. I now have two TiVO HDs with cablecard and am pretty happy :-)
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Will do :)
I survived and thoroughly enjoyed the multiseason story arcs of Babylon 5, so this shouldn't be a problem ;)
This is the sig that says NI (again)
For the most part I stopped watching commercils with a little bit of show on top. as far as im concerned they are double dipping. We are paying to watch the darn shows AND are forced to sit through stupid commercials that have their audio set like 20% higher most anoying but it works great at blocking them. You can get or make a volume detector and when the louder commercials comes on you can pause a DVR or just power down the tv for a preset time.
They don't put those inside programs, only between, and I think it's to give people a break to go to the toilet or whatever. (And they can only advertise their own products in them.)
(1)DOCOMEFROM!2~.2'~#1WHILE:1<-"'?.1$.2'~'"':1/.1$.2'~#0"$#65535'"$"'"'&.1$.2'~'#0$#65535'"$#0'~#32767$#1"
Yes. And when advertising dries up and it costs $200 per customer, the cable companies will nearly simultaneously tell them to get bent. They can get away with it now (barely) only because the cost is not insanely high.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I would definitely prefer a la carte.
I understand why the networks would be concerned about their revenue, but with the capricious nature of the entertainment industry, how hard would it be for them to come up with a new business model to match the innovation of Dish? I have a feeling there is more than one way to advertize a product, and they should look into this. I love the Auto Hop, and ever since a Dish coworker told me about the Hopper, I have been exploring new and different ways to enjoy my TV. Prime Time anytime is incredibly convenient, and I like that anything I record with Prime Time Anytime can be set to automatically skip the ads. It saves me time, and I don't have to worry about manually fast forwarding through the ads at every commercial break. Keep it up dish!
Depends on which government you're talking about, not all free to air is government mandated.