The Future of Red One

[Stuart English]

There's no law that says you HAVE to rent your box from the cable company, and that's a market ripe for cracking.

Great point Mike

[Mike 'Fireman' Ross]

Great point Mike

heh heh heh? :-)

Mike

[Rob Ruffo]

This business has always been Luddite on new tech, especially when it comes to distribution...

"I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone." - Jack Valenti, evidence to Congress, 1982.

They couldn't legislate it away, they couldn't litigate it away. So, kicking and screaming, they learned to live with it and make money from it. We have to do the same.

Mike

VHS was a new source of revenue, piracy is NOT. You can sell product placement, for a few cents on the dollar over what DVD and ticket sales were pre-piracy. I'm sorry Mike, but have you ever worked in film finance or distribution? I have, and do.

[Rob Ruffo]

For broadcast I believe there are consumer-level cards and boxes - Hauppauge springs to mind as a name - which have offered that functionality for years. And things like ReplayTV - the box was open enough that 3rd party software was developed to give a lot of additional functionality.

For cable... well that's a pet peeve of mind. Companies like Scientific Atlanta have that sewn up as a monopoly pretty much, with overpriced, limited, mediocre hardware. I'm pretty sure (and I know people in the STB development business) that it won't be long before we see independent Linux-based open-source cable STBs which accept and honor SA access cards (no theft of programming!) but have much more functionality and friendlier user interfaces. There's no law that says you HAVE to rent your box from the cable company, and that's a market ripe for cracking. Who knows, maybe the availability of such boxes, and the extra functionality that will be available once people start to hack on them, will breath some new life into the rather moribund and depressed cable business.

Mike

Actually there is a law, and the cable company can shut you down as you would be violating the contract between them and their suppliers of content. The reason is that any device that can skip ads will remove the revenue model from TV programming. Somebody has to PAY for content. It would be a sad day indeed when films would be made only hobbiests - and I say this because almost no hobbiest feature length films are any good - I can think of basically none.

[Elsie N]

Speaking of cable, wasn't the original selling point that if you paid for programming, you wouldn't have to watch advertising?

[Jose Alejandro Acosta]

Speaking of cable, wasn't the original selling point that if you paid for programming, you wouldn't have to watch advertising?

Absolutely - great point. Us old guys remember! It was a classic bait-and-switch.

[Mike 'Fireman' Ross]

VHS was a new source of revenue, piracy is NOT. You can sell product placement, for a few cents on the dollar over what DVD and ticket sales were pre-piracy. I'm sorry Mike, but have you ever worked in film finance or distribution? I have, and do.

Rob, of course VHS was a new source of revenue. My point is that the industry, by and large, did NOT see that at the time. The Luddites ruled, they wanted the status quo at any cost, so they kicked and screamed. In congress they screamed that it would kill it the industry and should be made illegal. In court they screamed that it already was illegal, it was piracy, and should be banned for contributing to copyright infringement.

They lost, in both venues. *Then*, perforce, they figured out how to make it a source of revenue.

A few years later they figured out that people were using VCRs and, later still, boxes like ReplayTV to fast-forward and skip commercials. You actually had Jamie Kellner standing up and saying, straight faced and serious, "skipping commercials is theft" - like, you legally have to watch the commercials.

With people like that saying things like that, it's hard to get taken seriously. Anytime *anything* new comes along in the distribution channel that isn't invented here, people scream that it needs to be made illegal, and at the same time say it already is illegal and the courts should ban it. But the genie *always* gets out of the bottle and can't be put back in. If you doubt that, try putting together a business plan to open a record store... do you remember when the music industry tried to get *MP3 players* banned by the courts??We have to figure out, as always, how to monetize it, how to shift our business model to take account of new technology. Anything else is Canute thinking.

Oh and there are a couple of great points down below about paying for programming, bait & switch, and cable; If you saw my cable bill before we gave the cable company the order of the boot, you would know we were damn well paying! My family simply doesn't watch TV any more, period - it's all Youtube, Vimeo, Netflix, and iTunes - the usual suspects. A lot more families will be going that way, I predict.

Mike

[Christopher Mills]

Actually there is a law, and the cable company can shut you down as you would be violating the contract between them and their suppliers of content. The reason is that any device that can skip ads will remove the revenue model from TV programming. Somebody has to PAY for content. It would be a sad day indeed when films would be made only hobbiests - and I say this because almost no hobbiest feature length films are any good - I can think of basically none.

Bob, in the US you can still buy a cable ready tv that does not require a box... is that illegal in Canada?
also, several manufacturers sell dvd burners that will process the the throughput of a cable signal and record dvd-rs for you...not to mention dvrs..
are these also illegal and unavailable where you live?

[Brian Merlen]

the funniest thing about piracy is the pirates monetize it more then the actual content creators. try going to projectfreetv or zmovie or one of the hundreds of piracy sites, they have millions of pop ups to negotiate through until you can watch a pretty bad bootleg...

the quality of the bootlegs is often quite lacking, which i think helps keep people paying netflix, itunes, cable, etc and the silver screen...


as for skipping comercials, my friend does it with his Tivo constantly, until he stopped paying for it and started using pirate distribution. me personally, i like netflix since at least its not so overly compressed, and the audio doesn't sound like a handycam recorded it second hand. ps btw the bootlegs....have no commercials....

[CocoBermudez]

I know I will get ripped a new one for saying this....but piracy, in my opinion, had to somewhat help all the paid sites and DVD's sales. When Napster first came out, I remember my friends and I downloading stuff and eventually buying the real deal from the stores because we wanted quality. At least it gave me the first understanding of what online downloading was all about. I quickly moved to iTunes and forever stayed there.

...and I wonder why I am poor...all those 99 cent downloads add up...Freaky frak!