Re:TV episodes from BitTorrent
on
TV Piracy is Next
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Nice idea except given the global nature of BitTorent how are they gonna target the advertising on a geographic basis ? A $100 voucher against my next whitegoods purchase at Wal-Mart isn't much use to me in the UK....
Speaking of which, it'd hurt their partners overseas too. Our only English language entertainment channels on satellite in the UK are run by Sky TV. Personally I ditched my subscription to their service a couple of years ago and now I get shows like 24 and Alias months ahead of their customers. I don't imagine I'm the only one to have cancelled subscriptions coz of the beauty of BitTorrent. As TV over p2p gets more popular these companies will feel the financial pain, and while that may give me some personal satisfaction it's also the time when the really big guns get rolled out of the courts and installed into my ISPs switch room...
Because at least the studio is giving the movie a fighting chance. According to the WierdOne's comments they (the studio execs) "really, REALLY liked what they saw, this is before the SFX were added". They're not requesting any changes, alternates endings yada-yada-yada. Speaking as someone who was active on the Firefly(TV) forums since the first week, the WierdOne's take on this has been very accurate from the get go, and he has never tried gloss over any bad news for the fans. Bottom line is, if Joss is happy with this decision then so am I. He hasn't led us wrong so far and there's been no BS either.
CTIX-6 is a very old flavour of unix and Uniplex is a not-quite-so old Office Application (ala MS Works) but it's all curses driven so you can run it on old dumb terminals.
It wasn't a bad package for its day but it had an interesting "feature", somehow it sidestepped any read permissions set on files or directories. It meant any of the secretaries could navigate their way to a sensitive area like/etc and have a peek at any file they wanted, not to mention each other's documents.
The sys-admin (not me) tried to get around this by placing the users Uniplex directories some twenty levels deep beneath their own home directory. But some of those determined gals just kept right on snooping around the system. In flash of (des)inspiration the sys-admin cd'ed to a users Unixplex directory and soft linked '.' with '..'
The current directory linked to the parent directory, which then became the current directory, etc etc. The drives were making an interesting noise when he dived for the power supply and yanked it out of the back of the machine.
Luckily the filesystem buffers hadn't written themselves out to disk so we were eventually able to recover, still the most spectacular crash I've ever seen.
I mean look at their track record, after Davros was introduced they were reduced to the level of galactic criminals and pests, not the all conquering ruthless invaders we feared from the show's first decade. Fanboys will prolly argue that in Genesis OFTD, where Davros was introduced, the Time Lords asked the Doctor to interfere to hamstring their development. He succeeded only too well. As long as Davros was around he caused so much internal strife among the Daleks, culminating in a civil war, that they realy were just shadows of their former selves.
I wouldn't include B5 in that list, the original 5 year arc was truncated to 4 then at the last minute got it's fifth and final year, when JMS had so obviously run out of steam. Even though there wasn't much of an overall arc I guess TNG went through it's natural lifespan, likewise DS9. Buffy and to a degree Angel both got to live out their natural lives, but I agree, investing your time and commitment to an SF show these days seems to be doomed to failure these days. Even now I still have trouble getting my head around Farscape's cancellation, Firefly I could sort of understand from the studio's POV, though losing the Serenity crew was, surprisingly, a worse shock to the system.
Andromeda was dross at the best of times, but of the harmless fluffy kind, until Kevin Sorbo got into jingoistic sabre-rattling mood and tried to turn the show into some patriotic poster-boy for newly avenging USA post 911.
Unless the picture was cleaned up to the nth degree (a long and not-cheap process) the older episodes will prolly take up at least as much space as the newer colour ones. All the imperfections on the source, grainy film, static from a bad TV signal etc all add to the "information" on the screen and will get encoded as such. Given the random nature of such interference compression algorythms won't be very effective on affected parts of the picture. If the original source is cleaned up a LOT (AFAIK still a manual process) then yeah we'll get more shows per disc otherwise we could end up with even less actual screen time per DVD.
You're assuming their flight will be cleared in the first place. After all, they're probably pacifists and the concept of "sky marshalls" would be very alien to them:)
I thought GPS even without the US military's intervention had a margin for error. True it might be measured in centimeters but when the performance of a horse is measured in microseconds (think photofinish at the track) those tiny errors become a relatively large factor. I just don't see that this is feasible to the degree of accuracy trainers and most owners will require.
Oh come on! You're locked into a hardware build that was "mature" when the X-Box first came out. Now all your titles are limited by the relatively workmanlike performance of the platform. People complain console games have no depth. Well the two main limiting factors here are the crappy resolution on the TV screen and the controller. I'm sure some folks have got marvelous key-bindings and will swear blind they could play an old Infocom text adventure on the X-box of they had to, but that kinda defeats the point don't you think ? The USP for consoles is plug-and-play, whats the point in spending half an hour getting the controller setup ? You might as well go back to a PC and enjoy games with some depth and variety.
If DVDs are to be released internationally (or region 0) then what about the knock on effect to cinema release schedules ? The US often gets DVD releases of movies that have get a cinema airing in the UK or elsewhere. This means either we get near-simultaneous cinema releases (ala Matrix Revulsion) more and more or the US consumers will have to wait longer for their DVD releases. The first option's more likely, after all, despite its innate crappiness Matrix:Revolutions took a collosal amount at the box office. Would it have taken as much if the word-of-mouth from the US was bad ? If they can swallow their pride (or more likely just put a good spin on it) the studios will prolly go for option one. Prolly.. Hopefully...
Has anyone picked up on the fact that they're deploying Intel Celeron CPUs ? Don't Intels have a unique CPU ID ? I'd be surprised if their monitoring software didn't report back the ID of the host machine and send it to head office. In fact the s/ware that displays the ads may very well refuse to run on anything other than an "official" machine.
Seems like SOCAN is trying to get the Candian IP providers to do their work for them. There'll be costs involved in getting the money from the customers then assigning the correct amount to SOCAN. If you've got a lot of customers this adds up pretty quickly. Of course the CAIP now looks like the bad guys to Joe Public. I'd suggest the providers simply forward on a list of customers contact details to SOCAN and let *them* worry about how to collect it. I'm pretty sure they won't collect much.
Let's see if I understand this correctly. Mars becomes an attractive propostition as a staging area for the belt. A Mars colony has the potential to be self sufficient within a couple of hundred years. When I say self sufficient I mean it could survive if all contact with Earth was removed. But before that point Earth rules Mars via the threat of cutting them off from basic necessities. So there's an Earth dependant colony for a couple of centuries, probably double that if Mars is diverting a significant portion of her resources and produce to support the belt mining activities. If the wannabe Martians are being shipped up in one-way ships (as the article suggests) then the colonists are basically slaves to whichever corporations paid for them to get up there and send them supplies from Earth. Not many people would voluntarily sign away their lives like that, to say nothing of their future children. And what about the first born Martians ? They had no choice in being there but they're in servitude all the same. How do you deal with the unemployed ? The elderly or those no longer physically fit enough to be productive ? It would cost a shedload to send em back to Earth with no return on that investment and they'd be in permanent need of medical support once they got here (stronger gravity, higher atmosphere pressure, allergic reactions to common pollutants and probably Earth's flora / fauna). In short the only way this becomes economically viable is with a reintroduction of slavery or penal servitude, and not just for individuals but for their descendants as well. It is indeed a very close parallel to the UK - US - West Indies triangle trade, except Earth now takes the role of both the UK and Africa as a source of unwilling labour.
We had an identical situation with BT Openworld a couple of years ago. The user community was pretty damn organised though and a mass boycott was threatened. True, BT Openwound (they've earned that name)had performed a number of spectacular cock-ups recently, so a compromise was reached. They twice daily scanned all IPs they owned for open mail relays, any found had inbound SMTP blocked. If you're too dumb to secure your mail server, you're too dumb to run one was their attitude and the user community agreed.
...at least in part as being unenforceable. Several years ago the Home Office introduced a law banning VCR owners from keeping off-air recordings for more than 30 days. The police declared it unenforceable and the govt. had to back down. Now I don't know about you but I think the police have got more important things to do than checking to see if Kylie's latest warblings are on little Johnny Smith's MP3 player.
But as one or two of the comments in the article said, where's the alternative ? The learning curve from Windows to a Linux desktop solution is still too steep. Managers will be worried about downtime, training costs and that old bug-bear, support.
Of course end users are hacked off, they're the ones who have to put up with the dross, but they ain't the ones making purchasing decisions or deciding company strategy. It's the managers and directors that need to be polled and won over
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Nice idea except given the global nature of BitTorent how are they gonna target the advertising on a geographic basis ?
A $100 voucher against my next whitegoods purchase at Wal-Mart isn't much use to me in the UK....
Speaking of which, it'd hurt their partners overseas too. Our only English language entertainment channels on satellite in the UK are run by Sky TV. Personally I ditched my subscription to their service a couple of years ago and now I get shows like 24 and Alias months ahead of their customers. I don't imagine I'm the only one to have cancelled subscriptions coz of the beauty of BitTorrent.
As TV over p2p gets more popular these companies will feel the financial pain, and while that may give me some personal satisfaction it's also the time when the really big guns get rolled out of the courts and installed into my ISPs switch room...
Because at least the studio is giving the movie a fighting chance. According to the WierdOne's comments they (the studio execs) "really, REALLY liked what they saw, this is before the SFX were added". They're not requesting any changes, alternates endings yada-yada-yada.
Speaking as someone who was active on the Firefly(TV) forums since the first week, the WierdOne's take on this has been very accurate from the get go, and he has never tried gloss over any bad news for the fans.
Bottom line is, if Joss is happy with this decision then so am I. He hasn't led us wrong so far and there's been no BS either.
CTIX-6 is a very old flavour of unix and Uniplex is a not-quite-so old Office Application (ala MS Works) but it's all curses driven so you can run it on old dumb terminals. It wasn't a bad package for its day but it had an interesting "feature", somehow it sidestepped any read permissions set on files or directories. It meant any of the secretaries could navigate their way to a sensitive area like /etc and have a peek at any file they wanted, not to mention each other's documents.
The sys-admin (not me) tried to get around this by placing the users Uniplex directories some twenty levels deep beneath their own home directory. But some of those determined gals just kept right on snooping around the system. In flash of (des)inspiration the sys-admin cd'ed to a users Unixplex directory and soft linked '.' with '..'
The current directory linked to the parent directory, which then became the current directory, etc etc. The drives were making an interesting noise when he dived for the power supply and yanked it out of the back of the machine.
Luckily the filesystem buffers hadn't written themselves out to disk so we were eventually able to recover, still the most spectacular crash I've ever seen.
I mean look at their track record, after Davros was introduced they were reduced to the level of galactic criminals and pests, not the all conquering ruthless invaders we feared from the show's first decade.
Fanboys will prolly argue that in Genesis OFTD, where Davros was introduced, the Time Lords asked the Doctor to interfere to hamstring their development. He succeeded only too well. As long as Davros was around he caused so much internal strife among the Daleks, culminating in a civil war, that they realy were just shadows of their former selves.
...they will come But what the feck am I gonna do with 250MB of spam ??
I wouldn't include B5 in that list, the original 5 year arc was truncated to 4 then at the last minute got it's fifth and final year, when JMS had so obviously run out of steam.
Even though there wasn't much of an overall arc I guess TNG went through it's natural lifespan, likewise DS9.
Buffy and to a degree Angel both got to live out their natural lives, but I agree, investing your time and commitment to an SF show these days seems to be doomed to failure these days. Even now I still have trouble getting my head around Farscape's cancellation, Firefly I could sort of understand from the studio's POV, though losing the Serenity crew was, surprisingly, a worse shock to the system.
Andromeda was dross at the best of times, but of the harmless fluffy kind, until Kevin Sorbo got into jingoistic sabre-rattling mood and tried to turn the show into some patriotic poster-boy for newly avenging USA post 911.
Unless the picture was cleaned up to the nth degree (a long and not-cheap process) the older episodes will prolly take up at least as much space as the newer colour ones.
All the imperfections on the source, grainy film, static from a bad TV signal etc all add to the "information" on the screen and will get encoded as such. Given the random nature of such interference compression algorythms won't be very effective on affected parts of the picture.
If the original source is cleaned up a LOT (AFAIK still a manual process) then yeah we'll get more shows per disc otherwise we could end up with even less actual screen time per DVD.
You're assuming their flight will be cleared in the first place. After all, they're probably pacifists and the concept of "sky marshalls" would be very alien to them :)
I thought GPS even without the US military's intervention had a margin for error. True it might be measured in centimeters but when the performance of a horse is measured in microseconds (think photofinish at the track) those tiny errors become a relatively large factor.
I just don't see that this is feasible to the degree of accuracy trainers and most owners will require.
Oh come on! You're locked into a hardware build that was "mature" when the X-Box first came out. Now all your titles are limited by the relatively workmanlike performance of the platform.
People complain console games have no depth. Well the two main limiting factors here are the crappy resolution on the TV screen and the controller.
I'm sure some folks have got marvelous key-bindings and will swear blind they could play an old Infocom text adventure on the X-box of they had to, but that kinda defeats the point don't you think ?
The USP for consoles is plug-and-play, whats the point in spending half an hour getting the controller setup ? You might as well go back to a PC and enjoy games with some depth and variety.
If DVDs are to be released internationally (or region 0) then what about the knock on effect to cinema release schedules ?
The US often gets DVD releases of movies that have get a cinema airing in the UK or elsewhere.
This means either we get near-simultaneous cinema releases (ala Matrix Revulsion) more and more or the US consumers will have to wait longer for their DVD releases.
The first option's more likely, after all, despite its innate crappiness Matrix:Revolutions took a collosal amount at the box office. Would it have taken as much if the word-of-mouth from the US was bad ?
If they can swallow their pride (or more likely just put a good spin on it) the studios will prolly go for option one. Prolly.. Hopefully...
Has anyone picked up on the fact that they're deploying Intel Celeron CPUs ? Don't Intels have a unique CPU ID ? I'd be surprised if their monitoring software didn't report back the ID of the host machine and send it to head office.
In fact the s/ware that displays the ads may very well refuse to run on anything other than an "official" machine.
Seems like SOCAN is trying to get the Candian IP providers to do their work for them. There'll be costs involved in getting the money from the customers then assigning the correct amount to SOCAN. If you've got a lot of customers this adds up pretty quickly.
Of course the CAIP now looks like the bad guys to Joe Public. I'd suggest the providers simply forward on a list of customers contact details to SOCAN and let *them* worry about how to collect it.
I'm pretty sure they won't collect much.
I guess it gives new meaning to the phrase, "It cost me an arm and a leg".
Why would we want to archive 99.9% of today's web content ?
Does anyone archive CB radio traffic ??
It's not a permanent storage medium, never could be, too many points of failure between your screen
and the server holding the data.
Let's see if I understand this correctly. Mars becomes an attractive propostition as a staging area for the belt.
A Mars colony has the potential to be self sufficient within a couple of hundred years. When I say self sufficient I mean it could survive if all contact with Earth was removed. But before that point Earth rules Mars via the threat of cutting them off from basic necessities.
So there's an Earth dependant colony for a couple of centuries, probably double that if Mars is diverting a significant portion of her resources and produce to support the belt mining activities.
If the wannabe Martians are being shipped up in one-way ships (as the article suggests) then the colonists are basically slaves to whichever corporations paid for them to get up there and send them supplies from Earth.
Not many people would voluntarily sign away their lives like that, to say nothing of their future children.
And what about the first born Martians ? They had no choice in being there but they're in servitude all the same.
How do you deal with the unemployed ? The elderly or those no longer physically fit enough to be productive ?
It would cost a shedload to send em back to Earth with no return on that investment and they'd be in permanent need of medical support once they got here (stronger gravity, higher atmosphere pressure, allergic reactions to common pollutants and probably Earth's flora / fauna).
In short the only way this becomes economically viable is with a reintroduction of slavery or penal servitude, and not just for individuals but for their descendants as well.
It is indeed a very close parallel to the UK - US - West Indies triangle trade, except Earth now takes the role of both the UK and Africa as a source of unwilling labour.
We had an identical situation with BT Openworld a couple of years ago.
The user community was pretty damn organised though and a mass boycott was threatened. True, BT Openwound (they've earned that name)had performed a number of spectacular cock-ups recently, so a compromise was reached. They twice daily scanned all IPs they owned for open mail relays, any found had inbound SMTP blocked.
If you're too dumb to secure your mail server, you're too dumb to run one was their attitude and the user community agreed.
...at least in part as being unenforceable.
Several years ago the Home Office introduced a law banning VCR owners from keeping off-air recordings for more than 30 days.
The police declared it unenforceable and the govt. had to back down.
Now I don't know about you but I think the police have got more important things to do than checking to see if Kylie's latest warblings are on little Johnny Smith's MP3 player.
He'll start looking for weapons of mass conduction...
Comparing the agendas on both sides may well be valid, but what about comparing the consequences if either side is wrong ??
If the tree huggers have got it wrong we see smaller profits, disgruntled share holders and short term job losses. Boo-hoo.
If the Megacorps have got it wrong (or more likely are simply covering up) then we've screwed up the planet.
The stakes are a little bigger.
or The Barbican :(
Size *does* matter :)
But as one or two of the comments in the article said, where's the alternative ?
The learning curve from Windows to a Linux desktop solution is still too steep. Managers will be worried about downtime, training costs and that old bug-bear, support.
Of course end users are hacked off, they're the ones who have to put up with the dross, but they ain't the ones making purchasing decisions or deciding company strategy.
It's the managers and directors that need to be polled and won over