It's Not TV, It's MythTV 437
ChipGuy writes "The New York Times looks at MythTV (an open source PVR technology), Bit Torrent and Videora and how they are disrupting the television business, especially the lucrative business of selling TV DVDs. Unlike the music industry, television folks are trying to get ahead of the curve and offer TV downloads in a legal and easy to use manner."
myth (Score:3, Interesting)
A MythTV PVR isnt so hard to make for the slightly above average user and is a great excuse to try linux.
The fact of the matter is... (Score:2, Interesting)
TV Downloads official=Not free.
BitTorrent>Official downloads. We live in a very capitalistic society, or at least most of us do. It makes sense that if you can get something for free, why would you pay for it? Even if that means not getting a third season of that great tv show...
Even so, shutting down the BitTorrent sites, as sad as it is, well placed advertising, and a few gestapo style raids will make a difference. Until a new technology for sharing even more crap comes along, and makes the Torrent look like Napster.
It's just the way things go.
Already beaten? (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunately, the "illegal file-sharer providers" kind of already meet my needs. I've no need for 90% of the TV channels currently available, or the commercials that are on nearly all of them. All I need are the few shows that I follow. Click, click, BitTorrent away!
Of course, none of these files give me super-high-quality video and audio. For that, I will buy the DVDs.
iTV (Score:4, Interesting)
However, what would make my life more convenient is if there was something like iTunes (iTV?) where for a small fee (50 cents a show, possibly a dollar) I could download and burn the show of my choice.
Admittedly I could use P2P to find the show for free, but I would rather have the convenience of a sophisticated search interface and quick downloads.
I wonder how the US networks will react when the BBC finally posts it's huge archive of shows on the web.
Better schedule, no ads... (Score:5, Interesting)
Pretty much sums it up right there. Viewers want to watch it when THEY have time, and WITHOUT advertising.
People are SICK TO DEATH of advertising. Anyone seen the Caltrain cars on the SF peninsula that are "wrapped" with a Target Stores advertisement? They make Caltrain $25,000/month. Riders *HATE* them. The recent Caltrain newsletter actually has comments from riders saying that they hate them, but Caltrain goes with them because of the cash flow.
Corporations love ads. People hate them. Corporations have more money than people. People want less ads on TV, corporations want more. People try to skip ads with ReplayTV, corporations bitch to the courts. I hate how it all works.
Do I hate commericals? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Finally... (Score:3, Interesting)
Unfortunately (Score:3, Interesting)
Unfortunately probably not an affordable one. Have you priced TV DVDs lately? Something like Law and Order is like... 40 bucks a season or something. And there's like nine seasons. That's insane, and I don't think it's the cost of the media that's setting this price. I think it's that they're setting that price because they're expecting you'll pay it, and I think they can just as reasonably expect they can set comparable prices on internet media and you'll still pay it. Well, I for one won't pay it. And I don't think we're going to see TV downloads reasonably priced enough that the cost is less of an imposition than the bother of me paying money to see Aqua Teen Hunger Force on my computer instead of waiting until Adult Swim time, going downstairs to my neighbor's apartment who has cable, and saying "hey can I watch your tv for a little bit?"
Look-- there's this place in New York. It's called the Museum of Television History or something and it's just this little nondescript place on the bottom couple floors of some skyscraper. They've got the entire last 60 years of television on tape. Not quite all of it, but all of it that's been preserved by anyone. That's what they do. They preserve television history. And if you go in and pay them... I don't know, It was like $8 or $12 or something rediculously cheap, they'll let you cram in as many people as you can fit into these little nicely furnished viewing booths and watch in comfort three television programs of your choice out of everything ever recorded. Now that's a nice offer.
That's not what we're going to get. By the time the dust settles and these services are up, we're going to get like.. select from this wide variety of random television programs, some of which are the ones you might actually want to watch, and we'll let you watch them once with periodic graphical glitches, hunched over in your cramped little computer chair with the tinny sound, after a 10-minute buffering session. You can watch that TV show you've forgotten from the 80s with the kid who can stop time because her dad is an alien for just a dollar an episode! Oh, what, you'd rather watch Law and Order? Well, that costs a lot more. You'd rather watch Sliders? Well, we have about six unlabeled episodes from different seasons, so good luck following the plot. But, hey, you like Buffy the Vampire Slayer? You can watch the show's entire run for just the equivalent price of a new XBox and two RPGs which cumulatively take 120 hours to finish! You like Sifl and Olly? Oh, sorry. Go watch the show from the 80s with the alien kid instead. But isn't our service great? Aren't you grateful that we're offering you on aribtrary terms and at relatively steep prices the same uneven entertainment that we offered at one time for free, and that you could continue legally to watch for free indefinitely if you or someone you know had just been forward-thinking enough to turn on their VCRs the first time they were broadcast? Man, those people who still download tv shows over bittorrent must just be so greedy.
It's bullshit. Much as it pains me to say Russia got something right, we really need to copy their compulsory copyright licensing program [allofmp3.com].
Re:The fact of the matter is... (Score:3, Interesting)
The way to get people to pay that can is to open the books to the public for any particular show.
Exec: "See folks, we can't afford to bring you another season of Popular Show #15 because not enough people are paying for it. Sorry, but if some of you non-payers paid, we might be able to bring back Popular Show #15 for another season."
If the books are not open, the people can always cry out that the non-paying downloaders are being used as scapegoats to cancel a program that isn't the most profitable, but still enjoys a relatively good following.
Re:First Post. (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't see that being an issue, one way or the other. Making the right moves to prevent piracy, or to respond to it, shouldn't have much at all to do with the scale or frequency of it... piracy is piracy. The difference here is that the bandwidth and storage issues have until recently prevented video from being an issue in this regard. That's given the TV folks (as opposed to the audio folks) some time to think about how they want to play this, and how to defend against the inevitable losses.
MythTV == stealing TV? (Score:4, Interesting)
Turned out a waste of time, I tried downloading episodes of shows I missed that week, such as the first episode of Alias this season when I did not know they moved to Wed. night instead of their old Sunday timeslot. I never get a complete file, so I quit trying...
But really, how is downloading the episode of a show I missed last night stealing? It ain't for sale on DVD yet, or I'd buy it like I already got the first three seasons of Alias. As for commercial DVDs vs MythTV recordings, I'd rather have the DVDs. I've got a PVR-250 TV card, but the quality isn't nearly as good as DVDs. The quality often is rather disappointing on my recordings.
I had for a while kept recordings of Futurama reruns, but ended up getting DVDs because they look so much better on my TV, and that's a freakin' cartoon that shouldn't be affected by quality as bad as live actors and stuff should.
I dont' often even bother to skip commercials. It still gives me a place to visit the kitchen or restroom. And while I have seen the quote from some TV executive that those things qualify as stealing TV, sorry dude, but when nature calls, that's more important than watching another instance of some ad I've already seen way too many times.
Non-Zero (Score:3, Interesting)
And if a portion of the money goes directly back to the show's production instead of subsidizing some reality tv crap, then all the better.
Although, I'll hold judgement until we actually see an iShows.com that offers all that they promise.
Because (Score:1, Interesting)
Don't even bother trying to rationalize these things anymore, or convince other people you're not a bad person just because you weaseled out of paying taxes to the corporate lords. People won't listen. The media tells them how and what to think, and the media is owned by a very small group of people which is getting smaller all the time-- all of whom get money if they can convince people that any act which does not involve causing money to flow into the pockets of the entertainment companies they own is "stealing", whatever that means.
And it doesn't matter what it means. All that matters is that it's bad. The television said so.
Msg to TV companies. (Score:3, Interesting)
The 30 second spot is dieing. Studies already show that people are so immune to commercials it takes an insane number of repetitions in order to have any kind of chance to be rememebered. Instead the Web is leading the way with largely opt-in advertisement with paid for placement.
If Google can make money providing free search and massive bandwidth, a great deal of R&D for new content all through on demand ads autogenerated based on peoples request. I have a sneaking suspiscion that a network that offered its content for free and had targeted paid for advertising around the process could do the same.
Imagine a FOX websight that works like Google. Go search for a show, or go to the shows site. Paid for adverts are to the side like every freaking web page in existence now. Some click through some don't. Download the show with a streaming advert delivering method aimed at the users login which lasts ONLY while the content selected is loading.
Of course to do this you have to completely revamp Nielson or out right replace it. Turn the marketing industry upside down. And set up massive delivery infrastructure and reorganzie the way your basic TV station works.
no biggie.
The rules (Score:4, Interesting)
2. They must be available for download before they are shown on television anywhere.
3. They must be reasonably priced.
If these three rules are followed, I look forward to kissing bittorrent goodbye for my weekly 24 episode download, and paying a bit of money for them. I'd prefer to transfer a chunk of money to the service and then have credit stored on there for a few weeks worth of television shows.
Not really a "Product" IMHO (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:TV is disrupting its own business! (Score:5, Interesting)
And if TV isn't going to entertain me, then I'm going to watch Family Guy and Futurama reruns until the cows come home. Or I'm just going to throw the damn TV out the window and go find entertainment on the Internet. Because playing Enemy Territory is a heluvalot more entertaining than watching a frigin busload of women redecorate their houses and elimidate each other.
Re:Cable Descramblers (Score:1, Interesting)
Once the cable signal is in mythTV (digitized) there isn't a way to recover the vbank signal. The "encryption" is done in an analog way, and it has to be "unencrypted" in hardware.
There are many ways of TV encryption, but I believe that this is the most common method.
ps. It's been a while, so I may have buchered this explanation
Re:Somebody's getting the idea (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The fact of the matter is... (Score:3, Interesting)
Thing is, if they combined that service with a Bit Torrent-like swarming technology, they could sell TV episodes 24/7 without significant bandwidth charges. A lot of people (probably the majority) will still opt for the convenience of a regular cable TV setup, but they would get all those users that won't buy both.
Time-shifting rocks. (Score:5, Interesting)
The PC has an AthlonXP 2000+, 512MB ram, onboard nforce video/TVout/audio,a 802.11b pci card, and a crappy 79AUD PCTV video capture card that came with a remote that works very nicely with MythTV. I have a cvs version of mythtv that I update and build every month or so.
So , how do I use it?
- With the 4 FTA channels that are available to me, I've got it set to record about five regular shows for me and my wife, plus a few movies on occasion. I watch the recorded shows when I come home from work, and possibly browse about 15-20 minutes of "real" tv. I will never go back to "real" tv, more importantly, neither will my wife.
- I use the MythDVD portion of MythTV for ripping rental DVD's. Wait, hold the flames! I use it in this fashion as I work shiftwork, my wife rents DVD's and I normally see them on the table about 1/2 hour before they're due back... rip them to Mythtv, watch them later at my convenience with the MythVideo portion.
*Side note: If anyone's looking for convenience in ripping DVD's , this is it. Insert DVD, pick which title to rip, select bitrate ("Good" on my system equals 750kbps xvid,2 pass,720x576 - works nicely for me) , press go. The DVD is ripped to a file in 15 minutes, and a Xvid encoded version appears in the MythVideo section in about 3 hours (on my Athlon XP2000+).
- I also have about 20 DVD's at home for the kids ripped and watchable in MythVideo. Oh, *cough* and a few movies I got from teh intarweb. First release movies arrive in my small town about 6 months after a good DVD rip comes out, so occasionally I use a fair sized chunk of my 16GB ADSL download allowance to get a few movies. I've also been busy lately downloading Enterprise episodes (have all of them S1-S4 now). Enterprise got canned on Australian TV at the end of series 2, I think.
- I listen to about 5 GB of mp3's/ogg's with the MythMusic portion and my wife is slowly ripping her giant CD collection to it.
- I plug in the USB gamepad and kill time by playing about 500 MAME and Super Nintendo (yay mario!) games with the MythGame plugin.
- I listen to a number of internet radio stations with the Radio plugin. Gotta love "the 80's channel".
- I have just about every digital photo I've ever taken in the Mythgallery area, which allows me to browse through and start a slideshow of images.
- I get a weather feed with MythWeather, with a 4 day forecast, current conditions and animated satellite imagery.
- I also have MythNews, a RSS browser... but I don't really use it often, as I have one in Thunderbird on my PC.
All up, it cost about 1000AUD to put together+ a few days of cursing to set up initially. It's been running now for about 18 months. The rest of the family's addicted to it now, so I don't think it'll ever be leaving.
Re:Argh... (Score:5, Interesting)
That *particular* business model is dying, and legislation should not protect it
I was thinking about this just a few weeks ago, and I think that the current cable companies have the technology to overcome a bunch of problems here, without obsoleting this business model (which makes it more likely to happen).
Most people who have TV have probably said/thought at some point "wow, 200 channels, and nothing to watch". Me and my roommate have a fairly large collection of shows we watch, which is pretty nice because it makes it a lot easier to follow a series, as well as you can watch whenever you want. I got thinking how the cable companies could do something similar using their video-on-demand systems they currently use for movies.
Say you have a system where you go to the channel, and you get a list of shows to pick from. When you pick one, it instantly starts playing that. What does this do? It allows the viewer to watch what they want, when they want, yet still leaves a fairly large amount of control with the station, and also importantly, leaves the concept of a "tv station" in place.
Obviously if you try to start a system where the cable providers do everything, and TV stations themselves are obsoleted, it's not likely to get very far - there would just be too much opposition. Each "channel" would provide their own limited list of shows, and there are lots of ways of providing them. For example, you could allow the user to select "The Simpsons" and see one simpsons episode that day (each day you'd air a new one). You could also provide a list of a few, or even all, episodes to watch. This could in fact start a new breed of specialty stations that provide ie, every simpsons, family guy, and futurama episode (and hell, I'd subscribe to that).
Another power it leaves in control of the station is the ability to air commercials. This is a huge power - you could presumably get info on what the person watchs and tailor ads to each viewer (of course this is fraught with privacy issues, and being slashdot, I'm sure I'll get jumped on for suggesting that). You would also be able to air current ads, even if they're watching a show that originally aired a long time ago (basically, syndication).
The station would also be able to overlay text in real-time, much like they do now. Down at the bottom: "New epsiode available next Sunday at 8pm!". They could still air live events (sporting, etc), and basically if you want to watch it, you have to tune in at the time it's on, or wait until it's over and gets archived for on-demand viewing.
In the end, you get a system that would benefit both sides: the viewer gets to watch what they want, when they want. The station still gets to get revenue from commercials, still acts like a "tv station" (with promos for their shows), and hopefully gets to curb some downloading, since why download when you can just watch it without having to get out of your couch?
Yes, it means that the viewer still has to watch commercials. The trade off, I'd hope, is that there is no extra fee for this service, it would just be a standard offering. Cable boxes could be set to accept either these enhanced stations, or the normal broadcasts.. if you tune to a station with enhanced features, then you get those extras. Satellite providers of course could do the same, but it would require either a two-way satellite (upstream is going to be low-bandwidth anyways) or a broadband or other constant internet connection (the current method of dialing up, picking a show, and disconnecting would be too slow).
I'm guessing that the majority of this could be done with current technology. Video on demand movies already work this way from the viewer's end. The stations or cable companies would just have to write the head-end software to insert commercials and promos.
this is not the same as RIAA/MPAA problem... (Score:2, Interesting)
Release the shows as they come out, via torrent. Make them as available as possible, perhaps even with *special content* like scenes that got cut to suit the slot, etc. Once this is the norm, the production teams will have lots of stuff to toss in for the web releases.
Include advertisements in the files (sorry guys, they need to pay for it somehow...) While the ads will not be as effective as broadcast because perhaps 80% of viewers will fast-forward, some of the ads will be viewed and that is better than a kick in the nuts any day of the week. This way, the market for independant digitization and broadcast of tv shows online will dry up. Why bother? The files are available on time, in high quality. Problem solved.
This couldn't work the same for the RIAA and MPAA people. But TV has always been an advertisement friendly format. It's ready to go!
There are other marketing advantages to this approach, without making it annoying either. Use your imagination...
Re:TV is disrupting its own business! (Score:2, Interesting)
Well, I certainly hope they don't change this model. By subconsciously buying into it, my gf constantly pursues physical perfection in hopes that I'll still find her attractive, and thinks she's lucky to have someone like me who, by comparison, is only a partial retard.
Re:TV is disrupting its own business! (Score:3, Interesting)
Have ya watched "Joey?"
In high-def?
I used to think Drea de Matteo was hot - very sexy on the Sopranos. Then I watched a few episodes of Joey in 1920x1080. She is worn out. Hardly looking perfect and then there is her character, quite far from perfect. On that show, everyone is a total doofus.
Sometimes the nephew isn't quite as big a doofus as everyone else, but that's about it.
Heck, Ling's character is a parody of the "perfect woman" -- she looks totally smokin hot, but she is all OCD on the inside.
Re:Finally... the commercial free BBC (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, they do still cover up some cartons, like on the makes on Blue Peter (a kids program where they often make things out of junk).
However, they advertise their own programs (eg on other channels) incessantly. It's almost like watching commercial telly. They also have a strange idea that the [BB] Corporation is a business. Thus they do things like spend half the license fee [a tax on TV owners in favour of the BBC] on Premiership football [ie Soccer] which is a huge advert in itself. When commercial businesses are prepared to be extorted out of customers money more fool them. When a publicly funded body goes round supporting multimillion £ wage cheques I get angry.
Rant over!
Well... (Score:3, Interesting)
With good hardware, MythTV is easy to get running. The hardest part on my Gentoo box was getting ivtv (drivers for Hauppauge PVR-x50 cards, etc) running on 2.6.