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TV-Links, F.A.C.T., Piracy and 'The Interwebs'
Posts
Thats not what I meant.
I was exaggerating to make my point clear. I didn't mean everyone who uses it was actually a dick. I was just refuting the simplistic idea that commerical online streaming was doomed because of the idea that as 'people are dicks' they would just go to ad free sources instead.
You know I'm very critical about the misuse of adverts, in games and product placement, and so on. But moderate, unobtrusive ads on websites, generate plenty of revenue that support good sites. And so the idea that streamed media couldn't be supported that way is bolderdash.
Though I personally think it's not fair to block ads from sites that I like and generate their income via them, I also think that you should be able to bend html to your own whims and desires. And it's clear that freedom has killed websites.
I think users should be able to permit ads like PA's which are great, and block every fucking IM icon and smily face service none to man.
2009 is a year of Updates - one every Monday. Hopefully. xx
Edit: Christ, half my post is in brackets. That must be diagnostic of some kind of inability to express my thoughts clearly.
Quite frankly the fact the the networks are still relying on the Nielsen theory of measuring ratings without seriously pushing them towards something that makes more sense kind of depresses me.
Does the Nielsen theory apply to Arbitron ratings?
I know Arbitron started doing that portable device that measures everything a person watches/listens to and for how long. I remember a story about it on NPR and how it took them a year to figure out how to deal with the information they were being given.
I mean, Arbitron recognizes satellite radio, the difference between in-home and out-of-home as well as DVRed material. And it gives accurate times as opposed to "I listen to show X every morning from 6-7 am before work."
I can't remember the last time I watched a program in it's normal time slot. I PVR everything and then watch at my leisure ... commercial free. Ok well not exactly commercial free ... I still have to fast forward through the commercials. But close enough.
Honestly though I either watch entire seasons of TV on boxed sets, or use my PVR to watch programming. No matter DVD, HD DVD or PVR it all boils down to the same thing ... watching TV on my terms, convienience and schedule instead of theirs.
yes, because when your PVR records them you're still watching the channel to record it
you just aren't actually watching it with your eyes until later.
Shit, I didn't mean that. I mean't HASN'T killed website.
Fuck I'll start again.
Saying "dicks wouldn't watch stream media if it had ads - and just go pirate it instead" as an argument that streaming shows is not fiscally viable is like arguing "dicks adblocking websites" means websites are not viable finacally. i.e. Thats bollocks.
I wasn't criticising the use of adblock, or calling anyone dicks. I was saying how it hasn't killed websites. Therefore people will put up with ads in streamed legal media.
2009 is a year of Updates - one every Monday. Hopefully. xx
This is what's known as the BTO principal.
When a pirated good is better than the original (in terms of quality, features, or conveinience) people will opt for the pirated copy.
Making the legal version of something more conveinient, better quality and have more features is far better copyright protection than any DRM, which will allways be cracked.
Don't be stupid, putting unskippable, tedious, insulting trailers telling honest customers not to steal will do the job cheaper and eaiser than making a "better" product or releasing content in the UK even vaguely close to the release date elsewhere.
What do you want the moon on a stick? Jesus christ.
2009 is a year of Updates - one every Monday. Hopefully. xx
Torrent (or stream) the shows if you wish, but stop with the flimsy pretenses that what you are doing is even remotely right (from a legal standpoint).
The point (or at least my point) is that the law isn't robust enough to define what is legal and what isn't in these kind of cases. Why should a UK TV license holder, who has paid for all the content on the BBC, have to jump through hoops of watching TV when and where the BBC decide. I paid for the BBC to license Heroes, it would be perfectly moral for me to stream/torrent it in my opinion, then I can watch it at my conveinience on my PC, streamed to my TV or burnt on a DVD or on an ipod, or on my phone - hell on my toaster if it had the ability to do it. I paid for it.
You are paying for the broadcast they put out, not each show on its own. So you dont have the rights to watch heroes whenever you want just cause the BBC licensed it and you licensed the BBC.
You have the right to watch whatever is on TV at that specific time and place. Nothing else.
So do what I do and stream everything legally down the intarwebs. I havent even used any kind of torrent for years. It is totally archaic and pointless when so much of this content is avaliable in better quality, streamed and faster, and completely legally.
the reason all these places can afford to put shows up on the net for free is on the premise that a tiny tiny TINY fraction of the audience will ever use that service. hence why so much of it isnt advertised heavily and kinda kept hidden.
Well the TV license is incredibly outdated anyway. And the TV license agency need to arrest anyone with a VCR.
Those things are the sole reason I went to the effort of finding out how to rip and re-burn some of my DVDs. The copy of Master and Commander I bought has twenty minutes of unskippable crap at the beginning (although the DVD player that I acquired more recently will always go to the root menu if you press the button, it also ignores region encoding, go on the £25 Tesco special). One of the Spooks DVD box sets as well, it has an extremely lengthy, tedious and poorly produced interstitial thing it insists on playing when you press anything on the menu.
I find I torrent less now since I discovered I can usually buy season box sets from amazon.com for considerably less than amazon.co.uk.
I remember those days. Hovering over the remote when you saw the barcode in the top right just so you could pause the tape when the ads came on, except you always missed and spent the next 3 minutes frantically trying to rewind and stop at just the right moment so Star Wars seamlessly blended from one section to another with no ad break at all. Those were the days.
It would be like me deciding I would like a stop sign at the end of my road and going out and taking one from somewhere else to put at the end of my road. I paid taxes for that sign, it's just not in the spot I would like it to be! It's still wildly illegal for me to do such a thing though.
Like I said, torrent the shows if you must (I do), just understand that a) you don't have the "right" to do it and b) it's against the law!
Would you argue that people have no right to set a PVR or other device to record the show for them? I don't think anyone has nailed down the distinction between recording something to watch it later and downloading it after the fact. The means differ, but I think the end is sufficiently similar to justify due consideration.
Note that I'm not arguing that this is typically the case, just that it isn't necessarily uncommon.
But one thing I want ed to add:
In the UK I'm legally aloud to set up a PVR (or VCR in the old days with more work) with one button to record advertless copies of the entire series of Heros. I can then format shift them, and watch them back, when and where I choose.
I paid a license fee. I'm allowed.
Sky++ prides itself on this ability.
This is great, and this is the future.
But many people honestly don't see how downloading a copy of heros from bittorrent is any different from the above. Bittorrent to many people is the equivalent "of taping off the tele." It's interesting to note that the BBC is i, f you read between the subtle articles, rather pro bittorent infact. One of the Editors of BBC new's BBC blog has him talking about catching up with shows via bittorrent.
And on top of that, I can do the same with free to air stations that run adverts too. Thats legal. It's also legal to stand in a corner and close my eyes whenever adverts are on. Or skip past them. Again Legal.
These examples, of course, are not applicable for things that have not yet been on free to air channels.
2009 is a year of Updates - one every Monday. Hopefully. xx
It's the old theoretical use vs. typical use argument. The content producers see the shift towards on-demand as a threat, used by those intent on avoiding recompensing them for their efforts, torrent advocates see p2p as freeing content from arbitrary restrictions placed on it by the traditional avenues of the mass-media.
The truth, as always, is probably somewhere in between, and I don't deny that for anyone who torrents an episode they could have watched on TV, but missed, there are many for whom torrenting is the preferred option simply because they want the content for free.
The compromise is probably a service that provides most of the features of torrenting, but for a fee, or otherwise supported by ads or some other revenue stream. Such services do exist, but most of them only make financial sense for the consumer if consume vast amounts of media. Sky plus is a good example. It's hideously expensive, and if, like me, you simply don't watch that much TV there are much better ways to spend your "entertainment budget." If the price scaled better with usage, I'd be a lot more interested.
I principally blame the tendency for these things to be subscription-based. I looked at subscribing to lovefilm, but for the amount of use I'd get out of it It's cheaper (although not much) buying physical DVDs.
Sudden thought: you know what would be great? Sky plus with per-episode or per-season pricing, instead of paying a subscription per month for channel packages. I'd pay for that, even if it had ads.
I thought the point was that if you record something from TV it is still going through the normal medium of being on TV, as opposed to cutting it out and going direct to source via download.
So you still get ads and shit if you tape something from TV.
Im sure some advanced Tivo thing can cut out the ads for you, but the point remains that enforcing downloads is a hell of a lot easier than enforcing recording from TV.
A lot of truth in that.
By the way you can get a PVR thats basically a SKY+ box for freeview for less than <£100.
I think a lot of it comes down to repeat sales. Currently they can sell it to the TV channel and so to the end user in advert views and/or line rental and/or tv license, and then sell it again in a DVD.
I don't think TV is doomed, but I think the arbitrary distinction between a transient and permant copy will become a lot weaker a proposition.
I the DVD player not matching the abilities of a VCR for most of its life (Which I suspect was very intentional) has lead to some of this acceptance of torrenting.
As people VCRs break, they can't get a modern replacement so explore other avenues.
2009 is a year of Updates - one every Monday. Hopefully. xx
But the end result is the same, (except for the ads, I'll concede that, even though the BBC doesn't have them and it's my understanding that any half-decent pvr will skip them automatically), and the people who made it were still paid, and no harm was caused.
What I'm getting at is that there is a clear consumer demand here, and in some people's minds it's indistuingishable from what they've always done (setting a VCR). As long as that demand is there, torrenting isn't going to go away, so if the content industries could at least try and cater to those consumers, I'd have a lot more sympathy for the content industries when they go after sites like these.
Your alternative is to wait. Or move to the States if you love their telly so much. You don't have a God-given right to watch shows just as soon as they're aired in America.
I know. I'm holding off until I can find one that'll also stream video from my fileserver, and preferably be able to copy files to it as well (because seriously, fuck burning everything to DVD*). Failing that, I'll just have to build myself a MythTV box.
*EDIT just realised how that sounds rule-wise. I mean fuck burning the recorded shows to DVD so I can then re-rip them to my fileserver. That would be a pain.
Heroes has product placement in spades.
PVRs don't strip out the commercials. It's up to the person watching the show on the PVR to forward past them. I have yet to find any torrented or streamed show with commercials intact. And I would argue that that makes all the difference. Timeshifting something whole is a lot different than time-place-format-shifting and stripping out commercials while you're at it.
Outside of some Sci-Fi shows I can't think of many shows that don't have product placement, big and small, in them. Ever notice how every character on every show this season seems to be using an iPhone?
Fair enough. I looked around a bit, and it seems to only be MythTV that does it automatically. I had assumed it would be more common.
How the holy hell do they plan to enforce half this crap? Answer: They dont.
Half the things in the world that are illegal are completely unenforcable.
I'd love agree with you, except that the law (at least in the US) says that even copyright infringement without financial gain is illegal. I don't imagine that the content owners cared all that much when you were swapping Duran Duran mix tapes and shoddy copies of Japanese anime with your friends back in the 80s but now that the digital age has made copying easier and the average nerds friend list much more broad it has forced content owners to take a new look at what they saw as permissible before.
Of course you could argue that since they chose not to enforce their rights back in the age of InXS that their arguments should be moot now. Because if you don't enforce your rights you basically give them up. If you let a hundred kids a day cut through your yard on the way to school there comes a time when you no longer have the right to tell those kids to stay out of your yard.
The point being that since no one has ever been taken to court over it (yet) it's still a mystery as to what extent a judge will rule something to be fair use. And of course no judge has ever made a ruling over at what point an undefended copyright becomes community property. And since there are now firms that have been started up explicitly to milk money from copyright holders in return for issuing takedown notices in said copyright holders name, I doubt that we're likely to see such a case anytime soon. Much as we're unlikely to ever see Bugs Bunny or Mickey Mouse in the public domain (curious how the copyright term gets extended every time Mickey's copyright is in danger of expiring, isn't it). O_o