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Watching My Neighbors Watch On-Demand TV

Posted by kdawson on Tue Jun 05, 2007 05:11 PM
from the video-voyeurs dept.
Media Television
Josh Levin, Slate Magazine writes "I have a magical box that allows me to watch other people watch TV — their movies, their sports, their cartoons, and their hour-long procedural dramas. And sometimes, usually around 11:30 on Friday nights, their soft-core pornography... I solved the mystery by consulting online message boards. At techie sites like AVS Forum, other voyeurs described their adventures in freeloading. I was intercepting video-on-demand channels through the power of my Samsung's QAM tuner."
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  • He's not watching his neighbors watch TV... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by reset_button (903303) on Tuesday June 05 2007, @05:16PM (#19404265)
    ...he's only watching what they're watching...

  • Bedtime is always softcore porn (Score:5, Funny)

    by raventh1 (581261) on Tuesday June 05 2007, @05:16PM (#19404273)
    Yeah, between childrens tv shows and softcore porn there isn't much that interesting, except that when they watch the nudity scene in a movie and then replay it 5-8 times.

    • Softcore porn.... (Score:4, Funny)

      by iknownuttin (1099999) on Tuesday June 05 2007, @05:25PM (#19404381)
      ...and softcore porn there isn't much that interesting

      Ya know, Softcore is actually sexier, as in, more of a "turn on" than the hardcore stuff. The hardcore stuff comes across as more anatomical than anything - at least in my advancing age.

      I said "cums" ...huh, huh, huh....

      OK, I'm not too advanced in mental age because I still think of "Beavis and Butthead"...I said "Butt"...huh, huh, huh...heh.....heh...heh....

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by try_anything (880404)
          Ooh, the acting is terrible, the plot is asinine, there are only fleeting glimpses of the woman's attractive body, but I am aware that the people on the screen are supposedly having sex!

          Softcore porn is terrible. The people who make softcore porn are exactly as artful and sophisticated as the people who make hardcore porn. Softcore porn is just hardcore porn with various things subtracted and nothing else added in. Softcore porn is:

          Bill O'Reilly without the incivility....
          Taco Bell without the indust

          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by o2sd (1002888)
            When I hear that women like softcore porn, I think, yeah, right, some guy pressures his overly compliant wife/girlfriend into watching porn with him, and she chooses softcore as a way of limiting the misery.

            Here's a clue. Walk into a bookshop one day and head to the 'romance' section. I know you've never been there before, but look for the women with guilty looks on their faces standing close to shelves reading small paperbacks with intense concentration. Pick up a few of those books and flick through the p

            • Let's try this in geekier terms... (Score:5, Insightful)

              by cyberwench (10225) <tunalei@gmail.com> on Wednesday June 06 2007, @12:05AM (#19407153)
              Think about things like slash and yaoi, which have been getting increasingly popular for women. They range from soft- to hard-core, and while a lot of them go for the emotional side of sex and relationships, there's no shortage of just straight sex. Ok, so "straight" is probably the wrong word. Or 'Queer as Folk' - huge female audience, and that's not because they identify with the single pair of lesbians. It's not guys writing all that Sparrow/Norrington or Aragorn/Faramir fiction out there.

              Frankly, as a woman my issue with actual porn in general is the same issue I have with movies in general. They're poorly made, the good ones are few and far-between. And frankly, if you're talking about limiting the misery, hardcore films at least have sex to break up the bad acting/lighting/costuming/etc. I'd have to disagree that hardcore sex is inherently violent - it's simply graphic. Maybe you're watching the wrong ones? =) Try looking for hardcore that is marketed to women... it tends to be better, all around. Especially if what you're wanting is something your wife/girlfriend/fling will watch with you.

              I suppose the point I really want to make is that women are very much like men in that they're individuals. If you think you're going to "understand" women like they are some sort of weird single organism, it's just not going to happen. Interest yourself in the individual and you're more than half there.

            • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

              by try_anything (880404)
              If you add back in the rest of the ingredients that women need, and remove the violent aspect of most hard-core porn, then you have soft-core porn.

              We may be working from different definitions of soft-core porn. By soft-core porn I mean the kind of stuff you see on Skinemax -- a split second of boobs, followed by two or three seconds of rear nudity, followed by lots of soft-focus closeups of faces or vague motion under the bedcovers in a dark room. When I say hard-core porn I mean anything where you can cl

            • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

              by drsquare (530038)

              You see, for women, sex is a package deal, and hard-core porn leaves out 90% of what needs to be in the package.
              That's PC bullshit. Women love straight-up, no-strings fucking as much as the rest of us. And yeah, that includes the 'nice' ones.

            • Re:Softcore porn.... (Score:5, Insightful)

              by try_anything (880404) on Wednesday June 06 2007, @01:34AM (#19407633)
              My theory is that the cumshot is a perfect combination of the following factors:

              • The event is centered around the man's orgasm; the woman's role is to receive and appreciate. Considerations of her sexual functioning, which are highly anxiety-inducing, are completely absent.
              • The cumshot can express either of the primary male fantasies of simple sex: that the woman is extremely eager, or that she is extremely submissive and compliant. The event centers around the woman's face, so her eagerness or misery is especially evident.
              • Most women find it objectionable, which highlights the extraordinary sexual eagerness or submission a woman who receives it.
              • The forcefulness and volume of the ejaculation is an easy measure of the quality of the act. A simple, concrete understanding of masculinity puts a man's mind at ease; subtlety makes him anxious. There's nothing less subtle than splattering a chick's face with a massive load. A bit of acting on the woman's part confirms the understanding.


              Given all this, I understand why the cumshot is a staple device, rather than a fetish, but I am still surprised that there is no market for porn that is specifically guaranteed to be free of cumshots. I imagine it would be free of other things, too, but I'm not sure.

              Complicating this is the fact that many women who enjoy porn have adapted to the porn model of sex, which skews the market. Some chicks, especially ones who grew up in repressive environments, have a lot of affection for pornography and associate it with their sexual emancipation. They interpret any criticism of mainstream pornography as a step down a slippery slope that ends in repression of female sexuality. They try hard to like cumshots and feel bad about not being able to "take it like a pro" through the back door. (They're also paranoid about people looking down on their sexuality. The smallest suspicion of judgment turns them into neurotic, inhibited wrecks. So no, just because I know this stuff does not mean I'm not the luckiest guy in the world.)
  • Watching what other people watch can be fun.

    I use stumble video and will often check out what my friends have watched recently, but the real interesting videos are to be found within the logs of random users.

    People find and like the strangest things.

  • Article is dubious (Score:5, Funny)

    by Timesprout (579035) on Tuesday June 05 2007, @05:18PM (#19404291)
    Author says

    My girlfriend suggested that I try plugging in the Comcast cable line.
    Only an imaginary geek 'girlfriend' would suggest something like this.
    • It doesn't take a techie. Heck, a suggestion like "just plug the cable in" in a world of proprietary cable boxes, encryption, DRM, a half-dozen compression and modulation schemes, cablecards, various incompatible resolutions, framerates, and interlacing schemes along with all of their associated digital and analog audio and video interconnection formats... is at best a long shot.

      Unless you have one of the LCDs with an undocumented QAM tuner and a cable company broadcasting PPV on unencrypted QAM channels,

        • Re:Or a complete non-techie (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Kadin2048 (468275) * <slashdot@kadin.xoxy@net> on Tuesday June 05 2007, @06:36PM (#19405001) Homepage Journal
          HDHomeRun [silicondust.com]

          Nothing else really comes close. Yeah, you can get HD tuner cards for a little less money, but they're a pain in the ass to work with and generally are less functional. An HDHomeRun is not just a tuner (actually, it's two tuners), but it's networked, so you can do everything with it that you can with a PCI tuner, but you can do it from any computer in the house.

          It's a pretty brilliant little box.

          Oh, and it works well with Linux, MythTV in particular. Once you start using that, you'll never go back to watching realtime TV.

  • I have the lesser model (Score:4, Funny)

    by ILuvRamen (1026668) on Tuesday June 05 2007, @05:20PM (#19404323)
    I have the lesser model of that device called binoculars lol ;) but hey don't yell at me, my neighbors are WEIRD! I gotta keep an eye on them lol.
  • As I read the summary on the front page, what should be the fortune in one of the boxes on the right?

    What PROGRAM are they watching?

    What program indeed?

  • Same with me... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by BMonger (68213) on Tuesday June 05 2007, @05:24PM (#19404365)
    I have the same thing going on with my TV. At first you think, "Wow! Free VOD!" but then you realize you have no clue when a show starts, no way to unpause if the real viewer gets a phone call or goes to the bathroom, and well... it's pointless. You end up flipping through a good 50 channels for hours having literally no clue what shows are on and no clue if that person will finish them.

    It sounds neat but it's rather boring and partially stinks since you have to manually program those channels out. I mentioned this happening when the cable guy stopped buy and he seemed pretty "meh" about it.

  • I read it for the articles? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2007, @05:25PM (#19404371)
    Channels 97, 100, 115 seem to be the on-demand channels in my area.

    I was showing off the ability to intercept on-demand programming to some of my friends the other day and we happened to come across some of the softcore porn being fast forwarded through. Curious to see what they were fast forwarding to, we watched for a little bit... the person fast forwarded to a dialog interlude. Our curiosity piqued, we watched a little more and noticed that as soon as the actual intercourse portion of the movie started, they fast forwarded to the next scene that included dialog.

    Could we have found the only person in the world who reads playboy for the articles?

    • Re:I read it for the articles? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by fm6 (162816) on Tuesday June 05 2007, @05:52PM (#19404669) Homepage Journal
      No, the people who write articles for Playboy are serious, big-name writers. (Having "real" journalism, essays, and fiction takes the sting out of being a softcore porn mag.) Whereas the dialog in porn movies is always excruciatingly bad, and the plot — well, the truth is, I've never had the patience to find out if a porn film actually had one.

      I guess your neighbor gets off on bad dialog, or he's seriously disturbed. Or maybe he's scripting a porn movie himself and sees no problem in stealing the dialog from an existing porn movie, since nobody listens to it anyway!

      • Re:I read it for the articles? (Score:5, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2007, @06:09PM (#19404801)
        well, the truth is, I've never had the patience to find out if a porn film actually had one.

        "Patience" may not be the word you're looking for

    • Plyboy has great articles (Score:4, Interesting)

      by geekoid (135745) <(dadinportland) (at) (yahoo.com)> on Tuesday June 05 2007, @05:57PM (#19404709) Homepage Journal
      I learned how to make martinis, tie a bow-tie, and properly wear a suit.
      They have had some great interviews. I highly recommend PLayboys articles.

      I also look at the naked ladies.

      My wife even bought me a subscription. Which I let lapse when we had children.

      • Re:Plyboy has great articles (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Tweekster (949766) on Tuesday June 05 2007, @06:12PM (#19404823)
        Actually playboy is great, if it werent for the naked pictures. If i want nudity i will get nudity, not airbrushed women that practically look like cartoons.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by UserChrisCanter4 (464072) *
          Fun Fact: There is actually a nudity-free version of Playboy that universities and major libraries often subscribe to and keep in their periodical archives. Although you're obviously making a commentary on the artificial models, you really can read it "just for the articles."

  • Wifi (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Fuzzums (250400) on Tuesday June 05 2007, @05:32PM (#19404461) Homepage
    It's probably just as legal as using a randomly available wifi signal...

    • He's screwed. (Score:3, Funny)

      by twitter (104583)

      It's not a secret. It's useless information. Given the reaction to many of the same kinds of infractions lately though, poor John Levine will be sent to Guantanamo for the next five years. Mr. Levine's article is to the movie business what the Boston Strangler is to the single woman alone at night - he's a traitor who's violated the DMCA and allowed people unauthorized access to .... utter crap. He'll be lucky if they don't just shoot him.

  • not funny "haha", but "interesting" funny (Score:3, Interesting)

    by neersign (956437) on Tuesday June 05 2007, @05:34PM (#19404481)
    My parents in Annapolis (writer mentions DC-Baltimore) have a similar occurrence. They also pay for basic cable and are able to plug the line straight in to their tv's digital/hd tuner to grab the digital signal. They also receive channels that I chalked up to being PPV, and some of them show smut too. The odd thing is that sometimes they can watch a movie all the way through, and other times they will loose the signal in the middle, almost as if some one realized they were watching a movie they weren't supposed to get and flipped a switch to turn it off. Sometimes they can change the channel then come back to watch it again, other times they can have the signal then change the channel and come back to find that the program is gone. It's very strange and only happens on one of the two tvs (different brand, model, and year) that they have hooked up this way. I guess this article explains what is really going on.

    I double checked, and no, Josh Levin is not a pen-name that my dad uses, so it looks like this is pretty common.

  • The possibilities (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2007, @05:40PM (#19404529)
    Imagine sitting alone on a Friday night, no girlfriend in sight, flipping through the channels, running dead up against a soft-core channel, looking wildly left and right irrespective of loneliness, yanking at the wanker furiously hoping there is time, and then being beaten by the creep next door who started early and staring at Ma Bush staring back at you from CNN.

  • Sounds like watching TV with my wife (Score:5, Funny)

    by xs650 (741277) on Tuesday June 05 2007, @05:42PM (#19404551)
    Having a program randomly fast forward and go back and repeat parts sounds like watching TV when my wife has the remote. Except for the porn part.

  • You'll go to jail for that (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Weaselmancer (533834) on Tuesday June 05 2007, @05:45PM (#19404589)

    It's not exactly the same thing, [slashdot.org] but close enough. All it would take is a prick DA and an idiot judge. Neither are in short supply.

  • Rabbit Ears? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Jimithing DMB (29796) <dfe&tgwbd,org> on Tuesday June 05 2007, @05:52PM (#19404667) Homepage

    I wonder if the author realizes that all of the over the air HDTV stations are broadcast on UHF frequencies so you need only a standard UHF attenna. Those are the loop kind or occasionally they enclose the loop in a rectangular thing. You can fold the rabbit ears down because you don't need them at all.

    Still, this is interesting. I might think about running a cable feed to the tuner and see what happens. I went with OTA in the first place because the cable company wasn't carrying the local NBC and FOX stations in HD but now they are. Never even dreamed I'd get the occasional free VOD stuff.

  • We you got something good, keep your yap shut.

  • DMCA wins again (Score:3, Interesting)

    by caveman (7893) on Tuesday June 05 2007, @05:58PM (#19404711)
    Unfortunately for the O.P. the DMCA will rule his watching of unencrypted video feeds a violation, because he is circumventing a protection mechanism.

    The DMCA and it's supporters have shown time and time again that it does not matter how lame and technically incompetent a protection measure is, it merely has to be 'broken' to incur the wrath of the law. Publishing the technical details is probably instant guilt in terms of 'trafficking in circumvention technology' or whatever the legalese is.

    The early analogue cable TV transmission systems in the UK used to transmit premium channels unencrypted (and then moved to using some fairly trivial to counter sync-mangling) which simply required a tuner that could see outside of the usual UHF 21-68 band to view. While the frequencies used on the actual cable networks were sufficiently out-of-range of normal 'terrestrial' channels, the company actually supplied an add-on box clamped to the back of the cable receiver which would downshift all of the cable channels so that the normal 'terrestrial' channels carried on the cable service were tunable by 'normal' TV's. If the TV had a tuner which could see outside the usual UK 21-68 band (Channel 21 is 471.25MHz, 68 is 847.25MHz) then the channels are there for your viewing pleasure regardless of what the cable receiver thinks you are entitled to see.

    All the article does is move this into the digital realm with QAM.

    Minus several million points out of ten to comcast for not encrypting traffic here.

    otherwise, it's old news.

    • Re:DMCA wins again (Score:5, Interesting)

      by geekoid (135745) <(dadinportland) (at) (yahoo.com)> on Tuesday June 05 2007, @06:06PM (#19404769) Homepage Journal
      Why does it need to be encrypted? he has no control over the show, the fast forwarding, the changing of channels. Pretty difficult way to watch TV.
      Plus it's not like you know WHO is watching it.

      Encrypting it costs them money, and doesn't give anybody any gain.

      He is not circumventing a protection, and I would be very interested to read the opinion of any lawyer who feels this is a violation of the DMCA.

      Yesh, there are a lot of stupid clients the tell their lawyers to send out notices, but they never seem to go anywhere.

  • I had the same thing! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by cmoney (216557) on Tuesday June 05 2007, @06:02PM (#19404739)
    When I first moved to my apartment building, I plugged in my Sony LCD TV and got to watch other people's on-demand shows until I got my own cable service. I was able to watch about 3 movies this way. It was kinda funny, they ended up pausing the movie at the exact same time I needed to get up for a health break. Also watched some porn and it's fun/creepy watching other people's porn habits and how much porn they "need". Haha.

  • It's because On demand isn;t usually encrypt (Score:3, Interesting)

    by DrBuzzo (913503) on Tuesday June 05 2007, @06:53PM (#19405133) Homepage
    You would tend to think On Demand content would be encrypted. Generally, it's not. There are some other interesting things you can find if you pick through the digital cable signal. Some stuff isn't secure at all, it's just set not to show up on the regular box's guide. However, third party QAM tuners can sometimes catch it while scanning for channels. It's actually somewhat surprising how haphazard the security on the backend of things can be.

  • New spin on old (Score:3, Funny)

    by LordSnooty (853791) on Tuesday June 05 2007, @06:54PM (#19405151)
    In the UK the older Sky boxes were notorious for offering your current viewing to neighbours - only this was simple RF leaking from the rear. Careful placement with a small aerial and you could get a half-decent picture. This meant you could watch your neighbour flicking through the channels, usually quite rapidly until boobies appeared, at which point he of course rolled back a few times in order to check out the action.

  • Not all cable systems do this (Score:3, Insightful)

    by nxtw (866177) on Tuesday June 05 2007, @06:55PM (#19405157)
    My local cable system's video on demand does not go over the wire in the clear. (Time Warner)

    I'm not sure if it's just encrypted or if it's done over a packet-switched channel (DOCSIS) instead, although there is mention of VOD IP addresses in the diagnostic menus.

  • Some TVs are equipped with a QAM tuner (Score:3, Informative)

    by Stavr0 (35032) on Tuesday June 05 2007, @07:52PM (#19405595) Homepage Journal
    The model I have has a tri-band NTSC/ATSC/QAM tuner and a slot for a CableCard interface. It took me approximately 10 seconds to find the VOD channels beyond the analog range.

    Now I would be really pleased if my cable provider could sell/rent me a CableCard, but I'm stuck with using their dreaded SciAtlanta decoder.

  • Now even less interesting! (Score:5, Funny)

    by mike_sucks (55259) on Tuesday June 05 2007, @08:47PM (#19405905) Homepage
    Who would have thought it was possible to invent something more boring than watching TV. Of course... watching people as they watch TV. Genius!

    I think I just felt the world get a little dummer. /Mike

  • Why not encrypt VOD? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mveloso (325617) on Tuesday June 05 2007, @09:36PM (#19406211)
    Funny how the comcast spokesperson lies:

    Cable encryption is done per channel, not per title. The problem is that Comcast's infrastructure is built on SeaChange, which is running Windows NT 4 (if I remember correctly). They just can't handle the load.

    The other architectures (non-SeaChange) can handle encrypted VOD streams, but tend not to because the operator hasn't thought about it.

    And lastly, encryption of VOD content is done by fiat from corporate - that's how the cable industry works. And that's exactly the kind of thing that corporate is for - to set systemwide policies like that.

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