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... »
Predator drones use less encryption than your TV, DVDs: Via Law & Disorder Section - Ars Technica.
What three-letter Internet acronym best fits the bizarre news out of Iraq and Afghanistan that militants there have been intercepting US Predator drone video feeds using laptops and a $30 piece of Russian software: LOL, WTF, or OMG? read more... »
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... »
DRM by any other name: The latest from Hollywood: Via Freedom to Tinker.
Sunday's New York Times had an article, Studios' Quest for Life After DVDs. To nobody's surprise, consumers want to have convenient access to "their" media, wherever they happen to be, without all the annoying restrictions that come into play when you add DRM to the picture. To many people's surprise, sales of DVDs (much less Blu-ray) are in trouble.
In the third quarter, studios’ home entertainment divisions generated about $4 billion, down 3.2 percent from a year ago, according to the Digital Entertainment Group, a trade consortium. But digital distribution contributed just $420 million, an increase of 18 percent.
Given that DVDs are really a luxury good (versus, say, food or electricity), the 3.2 percent drop seems like Hollywood is getting off easy. read more... »
Hollywood Pressuring FCC on Selectable Output Control Again: Via EFF.org Updates.
Our friends at Public Knowledge have been doing a great job in Washington, D.C., fighting against the MPAA's efforts to selectively disable the high-definition analog (i.e., "component" video) outputs on your cable box. In essence, Hollywood is telling the FCC that it won't give Americans early access to blockbuster movies unless the FCC lets it kill your analog outputs.
Public Knowledge has an update today, letting us know that Hollywood is back at the FCC pushing for this anti-consumer, anti-innovation change in the FCC rules: read more... »
DISH Network told to fork over another $200 million to TiVo: Via Law & Disorder Section - Ars Technica.
If it feels like the DISH vs. TiVo patent infringement case has been going on for ages, that's because it has—at least in relation to the Internet's attention span. DISH has already been hit with over $200 million in judgments relating to its infringement of TiVo's DVR-related patents, and a judge today twisted the knife in DISH's back, awarding TiVo an additional $200 million. read more... »
Movie studios again demand HDTV disabling powers from FCC: Via Law & Disorder Section - Ars Technica.
Hollywood's bid to force a yet-to-be-agreed-upon number of households to buy new home theater gear is back in business. The Motion Picture Association of America has once again asked the Federal Communications Commission for the right to selectively control output streams to the TV entertainment systems of consumers. "The pro-consumer purpose" (!) request "is to enable movie studios to offer millions of Americans in-home access to high-value, high definition video content," three MPAA biggies explained during a meeting they held with seven FCC Media Bureau staffers last Thursday. read more... »
Supreme Court Serves Up Remote-Recording Victory: Via Threat Level.
The Supreme Court on Monday let stand a copyright case testing whether cable operators may permit customers to store television programming on company servers to be viewed at a later time.
The issue concerns an August ruling by a federal appeals court, which lifted (.pdf) an injunction against Cablevision Systems blocking it from offering customers a recording service that stores programming on the cable company’s own servers instead of on viewers’ in-house playback devices.
Hollywood and television programmers maintained Cablevision’s service directly infringes their exclusive rights to both reproduce and publicly perform their copyrighted works. read more... »
Digital Television begins today - 6/13/09: Via New York News and Tri-State News - 7online.com.
NEW YORK (WABC) -- TV shows were replaced by the hiss of static in perhaps 1 million U.S. homes Friday as stations ended their analog broadcasts and abandoned the transmission technology in use since the days of Milton Berle, Sid Caesar and Howdy Doody.
Channel 7 turned off its analog signal and switched to digital at 12:30 p.m. following Eyewitness News at Noon. read more... »