Tivo/ReplayTV Are To TV What Napster Is To Music?

ContinuousPark writes: "We've talked about hacking the Tivo and, more recently, about ReplayTV boxes being controlled over the Web. Now, the New York Times is taking it a bit further. The interesting point is that while everyone is raving about the new gadgets or complaining about how useless these devices are, the reality is that they are eventually going to disturb the TV industry just as Napster is doing with the music industry. It's just that ReplayTV and Tivo have been very discreet about this, even playing along with the networks. But it will happen and it's going to be a major disruption. I can't wait. Read why." Tivo changed the way I handle TV, but its relatively steep price prevents it from becoming as common as Napster, which is, well, free. Both will alter their industries (and then the industries will converge, but that's another story ;)

Re:World ends. Film at 11

If journalists wrote articles with headlines like "Cool new toy released, things will be pretty much the same as they always have" they wouldn't be employed very long.

-B

Why is there no outrage?

Intersting how this article shows the evolution from current TV advertising to a world that is exactly like internet banner advertising. Yet their proposed solution -- highly targetted ads -- draws absolutely no outrage.

As I read the article I saw all the same arguments that people make about banner ads: No one reads them, 99% of them are ignored, if people block them then advertising will work its way into content in a subtle but insidious way, etc. Banner-blocking proponents like to argue that internet advertising is not like TV advertising. Well, it sounds like TV advertising is going to evolve to be exactly like banner ads.

The article crowed about how TiVO could precisely target people based on their likes, lifestyles, and medical conditions. Sending a Preparation H commercial to someone who has hemorrhoids sounds like an incredible invasion of privacy, much more than anything that any banner network is contemplating. Why is there no reaction to this?.

It says that the price that people will pay to watch TV in the future will be that they have to give up information about themselves to the networks who will sell this to advertisers.M

This is far worse than what ad networks are doing -- ad networks are using aggregated information to send users advertising that they may be interested in. And people are so freaked out by this that they are writing banner-blocking software, calling for legislation, etc.

If anyone should be complaining about these TV devices, it should be the privacy advocates. Are you guys out there? Where's the outrage?

Ralph

Modify these system(s) to support micropayments...

It would be great if this device could be modified to support a system of micropayments (since it is already periodically networked). I would be all too happy to pay in cash more than whatever my eyeballs' advertising contribution is to the networks. First, it would allow me to skip ads. This feature alone would be more than worthwhile to me, since I value my time more than the relatively nominal money that my usage raises. Second, I could see it having the ultimate effect of promoting the quality of television. One of the greatest ailments of television is the way in which is generates revenues through advertising dollars. In my view, they target the lowest common denominator and try to keep them in their seats as long as possible by seperating "good" stuff and filling junk in its place. This leads to a sort of corrupting cycle, as is seen in professional football, both in the duration of half time and other breaks, and in the excessive presense of marketing.

I could envision a sort of parallel system. For those who are unwilling to put up with crap and for those who can afford it, simply modify these TIVO/replay devices to pay the parties that provide the content. They would work directly with the industry to filter out 100% of the ads and create relatively contiguous programming. Just stagger the "show times" such that the TIVO viewing is offset by ~30 minutes... It would not achieve my second goal (atleast not instantly), but it would allow and encourage the producers of these shows to support a new system without having to entirely ditch the old. In time, and with luck, the new system would phase out the old....good riddance ;)

Opensource TiVo/ReplayTV Service

I've wondered for a while about the possibility of creating an opensource Tivo type of system. After all, it isn't so much the hardware here, any old fast Pentium system with Linux, a video card that has composite or SVHS output and a big HD would be sufficient.

What makes Tivo special though is the software and the tv listing service that you need to subscribe to. I'm sure the software on the end-user side wouldn't be too hard to do, and might even be done better than Tivo or ReplayTV's.

The sticking point is the giant database of TV listings that these devices access in order to know what channel to record, when and for how long. I've thought about using exisiting free services such as TV Guide's or Zap2It's program listings and then using regexp's to convert them into a database but I'm sure that if thousands of geeks started accessing their servers everyday for listings that sooner or later lawsuits would start flying. Is there anyway of obtaining this data legally for free?

One last thought -- TV tuner cards are cheap these days. Why not put three or four in our theoretical opensource Tivo and give the user the option of recording many shows at once? Someone please correct me if I am technologically ignorant on this point.

What does everyone else think about this idea?

Careful...

Incase the RIAA and the rest of the world hasn't noticed, electronics in general has gotten very good at most every aspect of signal production and reproduction, as well as transmission.

That means, by definition, the tools we create can be used to retransmit information. You cannot remove the ability to retransmit information without also removing the ability to receive it. They are one and the same.

We already have ways to interface audio and video to people - no matter how you encrypt or alter the data, the space between the black box and your head is where it's sent unencoded.. perfect for interception.

The RIAA complains that you can create "digitally perfect" copies of a work. But why does that matter? MP3's are a lossful compression scheme. People used audio tape for years before CDs became available. It's obvious the quality is "good enough" for most consumers - that was the state of technology ten years ago.

Who bloody cares how they encrypt it at this point, or what use it is put toward? We're past the point of controlling the media. If the industry wants to go back to using handwritten scrolls then *maybe* it'll have a chance at control.. but as certain religious texts have leaked out despite the church's enormous grip on the world at the time some scrolls were found.. I have my doubts to even that.

Give it up. Take your ball and go home, you're obsolete. You have been for a thousand years.

Rental Digital Media Good

I fully support the convergence of existing media outlets into digital media rental, so that I can pick what I want, when I want, and may pay more or less if it comes with ads or doesn't. So I can still watch "friends" with all the commercials for free, or pay $0.50 and not see the commercials. Or whatever (insert 28-comment-long nitpicking about proposed system here).

Audio and video are just software, at best. Really just data files these days, because there's not any interactivity. So sell it online! I understnad networks' desire to have a "prime time" where they can launch new shows in front of a captive audience, charge more for ads, etc. -- but they will just have to move into the future. I don't think we should let them hold us back.

Choice good! RIAA Bad!


---- ----

Mmm...

That's a major concern in the industry. Once you start talking about recording digital TV, content providers become very concerned about people pulling the hard drives out of your devices, getting the files off and posting them on the Internet. Nevermind that a standard full length movie would take even a DSL subscriber a while to download and once it's stored on the hard drive, it'll take up $20 or $30 worth of storage space (With hard disk space costing in the neighborhood of $5 or $6 a gigabyte now) Or you could write them to a number of CDs (around 8 to 10 for a standard movie, if I recall the filesizes correctly.) assuming you could split the video stream fairly well...

Of course, with a decent video capture card you can really do this sort of thing anyway.

BlipVerts, anyone? (DoubleBlipVerts for the drunk)

If you could compress the standard 30-second adverts by a factor of 10, you get the three-second BlipVerts "invented" by George Stone, Rocky Morton, and Annabel Jnakel. Remember the original idea: "BlipVerts happen so fast, they're over and embedded in viewers' minds before they have a chance to channel-switch."

The updated patent filing would read, "BlipVerts happen so fast, they're over and embedded in viewers' minds before they have a chance to fast-forward past them."

Couple that with the research that has been done on driver reaction-time and you can see that editing out commercials on-the-fly would be virtually impossible; indeed, you would need the electronic equivalent of an A/B Roll Editor to get rid of the pesky things. For those shows with a high beer-drinking quotient (like football games, guy), the BlipVerts could extend to six seconds because the alcohol-sotted viewer would need several seconds to find the button, let alone press it enough to make contact. So says the driver-reaction studies over the past 30 or so years.

The movie Max Headroom: 20 Minutes Into the Future (later released to video as Max Headroom, The Original Story) postulated a solution that assumed real-time viewing. Interesting that the same solution would apply to the easy time-shifting that the TiVo and ReplayTV enable.

(To show just how prescient the writers of the original script were, just how soon do you think it will happen that a television network executive will be able to propose this solution to a knotty scheduling war: "We can go porno early.")

Re:What's really going to happen....

I think that network television will remain a 4:3 picture and the networks will use the remaining space to run target banner advertising during the show.

That would be so obnoxious that I don't think it will happen. If one network did it and another didn't, the viewers would flock the one that didn't. The programming would have to be incredibly compelling in order to hold any viewers. I'd give up watching my favorite shows (The Simpsons and Futurama) if they did this.

Re:Basic premise is wrong. (no it isn't)

In any case, the article states that on a Tivo unit 88% of the commercials go unwatched.

Don't believe everything you read, sparky.

I can't speak for Replay, but TiVo doesn't have a 30 second skip for exactly the reasons you describe. They have a 6-second back, and three fastforward speeds (the fastest is virtually unusable to skip through commercials because you spend more time cuing up to the end of the commercials than if you just used FFW2). The two reasonable fastforward speeds still allow for the impact of the commercial to get through. In fact, as a usability researcher, I can tell you that the average ad has more impact on FFW2 than it does on 'normal' TV because the viewer is intently watching to determine when the show comes back on so they don't overshoot.

I use my TiVo almost exclusively and I can still tell you who all the advertisers are for all my shows, and for 90% of the ads, the brand recognition is more important to the advertiser than the actual patter contained in the commercial.

you're right on one point, though. Widespread TiVo and replayTV use will change the industry, but it's not a disaster. 15 years ago people thought the VCR would mean the end of premium channels like HBO and Showtime. Now everyone has a VCR and yet premium channels still flourish.

The biggest change the VCR had on the industry is the incessant inclusion of tiny station-identification logos in the corner of the screen.

It's not really the end of the world, but with all the press the DeCSS and Napster cases are getting, it's no wonder people are in a hype-happy mood for any sort of digital copying.

Kevin Fox

World ends. Film at 11

I love the subhead: It will also spy on you, destroy prime time and shatter the power of the mass market. Is it just impossible for people to accept a new paradigm without thinking that all that preceded it will be destroyed? Movies didn't kill theatrical performances, TV didn't kill movies, the VCR didn't kill broadcast TV, yada yada yada. Or maybe this is just the same mentality that thinks the public is unbelievably stupid, so that after a story that taking an aspirin a day may be good for you, they must warn us that we shouldn't go out and take a hundred.

Re:Cassetts

What are you? On crack? There was a whole lawsuit against Sony for releasing a Cassette player, and then a cassette recorder (both video). Sony almost lost due to the MPAA claiming that it would reduce revenues for the theatres. TV stations shouldn't really care due to the presence of commercials (except cable channels - HBO perhaps). However, this kind of storage and copying method was flawed due to it's analog nature which causes the quality to degrade with each copying, and degrade by itself with time. Now, with digital methods like the Tivo and Replay copying and storage has the potential to become to TV what mp3's and napster became to music. But, with all this speak and propaganda, one still has to realize: most TV is free anyway, and as long as you keep the original commercials, why do the companies really care??? It's giving them more eyes in order to sell ads (granted they can't tell how many, but they couldn't really do that with antenna watchers either).

TiVo/ReplayTV *NOT* the same as Napster...

At least not at this point.

TiVo and ReplayTV are replacements for VCRs. They are designed to time shift the playing of television broadcasting. This process has been supported in courts 20 years ago as fair use. The reason is because you have been granted access to the video, you are simply time shifting your viewing of it.

Napster is a totally different thing, it is music broadcasting, without paying royalties. It's not time-shifting, it's not fair use, it's just plain out and out theft. Napster is a company which preys off the work of other people. If there is any company on this planet which deserves to be called immoral and unethical, it is Napster.

Until people understand the difference, which ain't exactly subtle, I don't see how you can intelligently debate these issues.

Sheesh

Add-on for my PC!!!

I want a do-it-your-damn-self TiVo sort of thing. All one would really need is a good video capture card and the ability to tell it when and what to record. It would be trivial to make it as good as an internet-controllable VCR, but getting a database to pull from for better info would be more difficult. It might be possible to use the GuidePlus+ signal from Gemstar that televisions are starting to support-- someone with better signal analysis equipment than me will have to decode their signal, though.

I can see where this is going...

TVs are getting ever smarter.. The TiVO monitors what you watch, constantly records shows that it thinks you might like. It adapts to you, the viewer.. and everyone rejoices.

Fast-forward to the future (hah). Maybe 5 years down the road. This bidirectional communication between the networks, and the advertisers that pay them, gets even better. Now, the TiVo knows when you are in the room, using motion sensors. It loads up your favorite 20 shows that you missed while you were out walking the dog. Your viewing habits are immediately transmitted to Pepsi-GM-Warner.

2 years down the road. If you can watch TV, why can't it watch you? Mini cameras are installed in each TIVO, so it can figure out where exactly in the room you are, to give you the best "viewing experience". By now, since ads are inserted automatically into each tv show, you can point and click on whatever you want and you immediately buy it (Copywrite (c)2008 Amazon-Ford-Disney), the price of TiVOs drops to all an time low, and you can have one in every room, and viewers rejoice!

Again, a few short years into the future. Face it, the TIVO knows you so well that you don't even have the chance of picking what you want to watch anymore. Police use the installed cameras to reduce "terrorism, kiddie porn, and not watching your shows when the TIVO tells you to."

I can't wait.
Your Anonymous (?) Coward..

Virtual-Product Placement

From the article:

Either the ads will need to become as entertaining as the programs or the programs will need to contain the ads, so that they cannot be stripped out. If Jennifer Aniston wants to remain a Friend, she may need to don a T-shirt that says "Diet Coke."

Believe it. I worked on a hardware/software project which monitored a camera feed at a "sports venue" where we were doing a live broadcast. It would detect a particular advertising sign along the course, and remap it, in real time, with a selected advertisement, and THAT was what was broadcast to the TV viewers.

So, instead of virtualizing the ENTIRE stage/world with live actors, they could use blue-screen-colored products on the set. Then, the producers could acquire and transmit the coordinates (maybe in the vertical blanking interval?) The images to be placed could have been transmitted during prior VBIs.

The broadcasters would encode a default product placement on the broadcast. The TiVo box, knowing the user's preferences, and having access to the product's coordinates, could generate, in real-time, a virtual product to place there, instead.

So, depending on viewer's preferences, Jennifer Aniston 's t-shirt may say "Diet Coke" OR "Budweiser". That said, I doubt it would take long for a /.'er to create their own image files to be mapped.

Will advertising die, or get stealthy?

I don't think I'm the only one looking forward to the day when I can watch TV programs with all the commercials snipped out, but I don't think that means that ads will disappear. The inevitable spread of TiVo/Replay-like devices will make it hard to compel people to watch ads in little 15-second or 30-second snippets, but advertisers will do their best to get their stuff seen, regardless.

Advertisers' response will be to eventually switch to a model of product placement in the content itself. It's already a very widespread phenomenon, from all the sports wares hawked in Jerry Maguire, to the number of Pottery Barn mentions in a particular episode of Friends ... And that kind of advertising is much, much harder to edit out.

The thing is, you can make distribution and reediting of this stuff practically free, but production of content will still remain (relatively) costly. If every show looked like South Park, then anybody with a decent computer could put out their own, but most shows require a set, actors, costumes, cameras, crew, etc., etc. Information wants to be free, but not when its production depends on so many atoms.

Francis Hwang

not quite there yet

The main reason the TV industry isn't worried about TiVo is that because TV is quite a different beast from music. The ways in which they make money are very different, while the music industry makes money from you buying CDs, the TV industry makes money by having you watch commercials. Because of this, the methods of distribution are very different. Music is duplicated on many CDs and people buy the CDs, TV is sent normally once at the same time to everyone. Also, music is resued (you listen to a song over and over again) much more than TV programs (do you watch the same episode of Simpsons many times in the same day?) which are typically watched once.

Because TV isn't reused, most people like to watch programs the first time that it airs. Even if everyone had a TiVo, there would still be millions of viewers watching the Superbowl and all the commercials during the game. Why would you want to watch it later and how many times would you rewatch the game? And if you wanted to rewatch the game, wouldn't you use a vcr to make a tape rather than leaving it on your TiVo taking up space?

TiVo doesn't really hurt the TV industry anymore than VCRs do. While I admit that TiVo is much more convenient than a VCR, I don't think that the inconvenience of a VCR has prevented anyone from taping a program they really wanted to see.

Basic premise is wrong.

The RIAA doesn't like Napster because it interferes with the revenue stream. Music studios get money when people buy new CDs and don't when they're distributed via Napster.

TV, on the other hand, gets revenue through advertising. Neither ReplayTV nor TiVo chops out commercials, so digitally distributed recordings have the commercials in place. every time it's passed around and watched, the commercials are watched too.

So, all that the TV industry needs to do is find a way to get reasonable metrics on which shows are recorded, and which are being passed around, so they can adjust their estimate of the number of impressions a given show, and consequently the commercials, will be viewed, and incorporate that into the price of advertising for a particular show. In fact, both TiVo and ReplayTV already supply 'number of recordings' metrics to the networks. It wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that the networks are using these figures to adjust the viewership estimates for many shows like X-Files and South Park.

In Canada, for example, the courts have decided that it's okay to redistribute broadcast TV as long as the commercials remain intact. It's not taking money out of anyone's pocket as long as 'recording viewings' are factored into the original advertising and residuals charges.

This is hardly the same thing as copying and distributing purchased CDs.

Kevin Fox

Auto-zap commercials

I'm waiting for commercial auto-zap. Connect the Tivo to the Internet and have it consult a directory listing of when commercials occurred on all recorded stations. Then just delete those segments after recording is complete.

Also, where is the mouse wheel on notebooks. Still waiting for the obvious there.