ABC goes dark for New York Cablevision subscribers: Via Washington Post Tech.
Just after the stroke of midnight Sunday, 3 million Cablevision viewers in the New York area lost their ABC channel because of an impasse by the cable operator and broadcaster to resolve a feud over transmission fees.
And unless an agreement is reached during the day between Cablevision and Walt Disney, the parent company of ABC, viewers won't see George Clooney or Sandra Bullock stroll the red carpet at The Oscars. And subscribers will miss out on some of television's most popular shows such as Lost and Good Morning America.
The negotiation breakdown was the latest in a series of similar standoffs between broadcasters and paid television providers. Time Warner Cable and New Corp.'s Fox eventually came to an agreement late last year after a long battle over fees. The Federal Communications Commission has largely stayed on the sidelines of such negotiations. But some lawmakers and consumer groups have urged greater involvement by the agency to prevent viewers from missing out.
"If negotiations break down to the point of intractability, the FCC should step in and faciliate fair arbitration," said Ben Scott, policy director of public interest group Free Press. read more... »
NBC Removes Conan O'Brien From the Web: Via Peter Kafka | MediaMemo | AllThingsD.
Remember the whole Conan O’Brien/Jay Leno imbroglio from last month? Perhaps NBC wishes you didn’t. The GE (GE) unit has removed every episode of the show’s seven-month run from its NBC.com site, as well as Hulu, the site NBC owns with News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox and Disney’s (DIS) ABC.
A little odd, given that a couple of days ago, the network was offering every single “Tonight Show” episode O’Brien had taped on NBC.com. But then again, everything about this story has been odd. NBC declined to comment.
NBC–at least, I’m assuming it’s NBC–has also been aggressive about taking down Conan episodes from Google’s (GOOG) YouTube.
Read Original Article:(Via Peter Kafka | MediaMemo | AllThingsD.)
Will your big-screen Super Bowl party violate copyright law?: Via Law & Disorder Section - Ars Technica.
An offhand comment the other day by a friend caught my attention—"Did you know that you can't watch the Super Bowl on a TV screen larger than 55 inches? Yeah, it's right there in the law."
With the Colts and Saints set to do battle in Super Bowl XLIV, this seemed worth looking into as a public service. Could it be that some of those giant flat panel TV sets now finding their way into US living rooms are actually violating copyright law?
Read Original Article:(Via Law & Disorder Section - Ars Technica.)
Netflix to FCC: scary loophole in net neutrality rules: Via Law & Disorder Section - Ars Technica.
Netflix, the company that mails out DVDs and streams movies to millions of home theater potatoes, made the rounds to the Federal Communications Commission on Friday. The company's general counsel told staffers and Commissioners that the movie rental distributor supports the agency's proposed Internet nondiscrimination rules. But they also include a potentially nasty loophole, Netflix warned—the "managed services" category that the Commission created in its Notice of Proposed Rulemaking back in October.
Read Original Article:(Via Law & Disorder Section - Ars Technica.)
TV Everywhere: Collusion Anywhere?: Via Freedom to Tinker.
FreePress and the National Cable and Telecom Association (NCTA) are talking past each other about TV Everywhere, a new initiative from the cable TV industry. FreePress says TV Everywhere is the cable industry's collusive attempt to limit competition; the NCTA says it's an exciting new product opportunity for consumers. Let's unpack this issue and see who might have a point, and who is blowing smoke.
We're at a critical point in the history of television. In recent years, most people have gotten TV shows from a traditional cable or satellite service. Now more and more people are getting shows on the Internet. Cable companies need to adapt, somehow, or become dinosaurs.
Which brings us to TV Everywhere. The idea, according to the NCTA, is for cable companies to offer their residential subscribers online access to the same shows they get at home. Existing consumers get more, at no extra charge -- who would complain about that? -- but only if they keep buying traditional cable service.
FreePress tells a different story, in which cable industry companies have agreed among themselves that this is their sole Internet distribution strategy. If such an agreement exists, it is problematic -- it looks like a classic market division agreement, which is bad for consumers and (as I understand it) presumptively illegal. read more... »
SOC's slippery slope: good enough for movies, why not sports?: Via Law & Disorder Section - Ars Technica.
Back when we had our debate with cable's top lobbyist Kyle McSlarrow over whether to let Hollywood block analog streams to your home theater setup, I asked a worried question. If the Federal Communications Commission does give movie studios and cable companies the green light to implement Selectable Output Control (SOC) on "premium" early run movies, who else might petition for it next? read more... »
Satellite TV to FCC: we're special, don't make us open up: Via Law & Disorder Section - Ars Technica.
If you've tried to pump your fully-paid-up cable connection into, say, a computer running Windows Media Center, you've probably come up against the closed nature of pay-TV and the severe limitations of CableCARD. And what about satellite TV? Don't even think about it.
The FCC wants to blow open the market for third-party video devices, scrapping some of the current (failed) CableCARD rules and adding satellite providers to the list. read more... »
MPAA to FCC: critics of video blocking proposals are lying: Via Law & Disorder Section - Ars Technica.
The movie studios have a new Holy Grail, it seems: Federal Communications Commission permission to cable companies to shut down the analog streams on video-on-demand movie programming. As Ars readers know, we've been covering this issue for a while. But the Motion Picture Association of America's latest letter to the FCC pulls out all the stops, rhetoric-wise, calling criticisms of this scheme "complete and utter nonsense that only can be intended to stir up baseless fears among consumers that their equipment will suddenly go dark and be unusable for any purpose." read more... »
5 million Star Trek pirates vs. 1 FCC broadband plan: Via Law & Disorder Section - Ars Technica.
Paramount Pictures says that, in the months following the theatrical release of Star Trek, the media company tracked more than five million IP addresses that downloaded one of six camcorded copies of the movie. The first was in Russian, but it was followed by editions from the Philippines, the Ukraine, Spain, Germany, and finally the United States. Who does Paramount blame for this? Pretty much the entire Internet, it seems, including google.com, youtube.com, Microsoft's bing.com, yahoo.com, and, of course, millions of 'Net users.
Read Original Article:(Via Law & Disorder Section - Ars Technica.)
DVR is TV's New BFF: Via EFF.org Updates.
Digital Video Recorders, once considered a mortal threat by the entertainment industry, have now become its new best friend. It's just the latest example of how the industry's constant warnings of the dangers of "piracy" frequently turn out to be baseless hysteria.
Remember 2001? Digital Video Recorders ("DVRs") like TiVo and ReplayTV were poised to win mainstream adoption, allowing consumers to fast-forward past advertisements more easily than before. In response, the entertainment industry behaved predictably — it freaked out and filed a bunch of lawsuits.
Industry analysts claimed that DVR "potentially threatens the very lifeblood of how television is funded and how it's used for marketing and advertising." A coalition of television studios including Viacom, Disney, and NBC filed suit against SonicBlue, makers of ReplayTV, arguing that skipping commercials "effectively circumvents the means of payment to copyright owners for the programming being viewed... (and) thus constitutes copyright infringement."
Fast-forward eight years, and these claims turn out to be — surprise! — wrong. This weekend, The New York Times announced that "DVR ratings now add significantly to live ratings and thus to ad revenue." read more... »