JumpTV Hopes to Succeed where ICraveTV failed.

SubtleNuance writes "32BitsOnline is reporting in this article that a Montreal, Canada startup called JumpTV.com will launch a service similar to the foiled ICraveTV.com. Using BorderControl.com, a more robust -and controversial- system of assuring a users geographical location, the startup is hoping to succeed where its predecessor failed." It figures out where you are (based on your IP) and then gives you television from you area (if its got it) in the form of a an online VCR. How long will this one last?

I'm surprised someone hasn't posted this link yet.

http://www.theonion.com/onion3308/realtimetv.html

Although with the olympics going on, I wouldn't mind actually having a television

Tunnelling

Considering the fact that you can tunnel packets through a host in another geographical location using SSH or other methods, this method is inherently flawed.

Check out what NBC is doing...

For the Olympics, NBC has a deal with hundreds of American ISPs where they transmit the streams to the ISPs, whose customers are located only within the U.S. Perhaps JumpTV would have better success if they tried something like that, though I suspect they don't have the same clout that NBC does to get something like that implemented.

bordercontrol.com gives very funny results

Try to check them with 10.0.0.1 or 192.168.0.1. You are in -- Netherlands! :-)
Besides, if you use an anonymizer or a proxy server, it is its IP address, not yours that applies.
A snail-mail letter sent to your real street address in the right area with some activation code would do much better than this silly check.. Of course, then you ask your aunt in Montreal to forward this letter to you and you can see her TV channels etc..

Funny?! They're right on the money!

My 192.168.x.x network is in the Netherlands, so they are spot on! ;-)

Jacco
---
# cd /var/log

It is is a joke!

Try entering a nonexistent domain name at bordercontrol.com [bordercontrol.com], such as apdokxxas.com [bordercontrol.com] -- it gives (at least to me) USA, Japan, Canada, Germany or nothing on random.

This should be used to authenticate country of origin?

From the article:
Fenton [the system administrator(sic!)] said he has tried many times to fool Border Control, but has yet to outsmart its massive database of Internet protocol (IP) addresses linked to geographic information. (Web surfers can test the technology themselves at http://www.bordercontrol.com/ )

And keeping geographical info on IP addresses in an apparently static database?

I can't explain all this otherwise -- it is just a joke. I don't know, who made the joke though -- 32bitsonline, this JumpTV, or the authors of this "Border Control".

Or do they really mean it?

Geographical Franchises

I wonder how long the current model of geographical franchises for television distribution is going to last. The technical and economic reasons for the system are disappearing. This is already starting to happen in the telephone business, many companies are starting to offer regional or nation-wide local calling areas. Satellite radio broadcasting is due to appear soon. Direct broadcast satellites already provide cable-like video service to millions of homes.

Why do we need local network affiliate broadcasters to relay the network feed? Why not just provide the network feed to anyone who wants to watch or distribute it, provided they don't modify it without permission.

What happens when it becomes practical to distribute high quality video streams via the Internet? Canada blocks direct broadcast satellite transmissions from the USA, apparently because they can't regulate it and mandate "Canadian content". Why shouldn't I be able to watch the CBC and BBC, in addition to NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS and the other American networks. How about the goat pr0n channel from Tierra del Fuego?

Nobody here gets it...

Why does nobody on Slashdot get it? Border Control isn't to block Americans from using JumpTV. It's to stop JumpTV from getting sued in the US (or at least, losing a lawsuit in the US). If JumpTV can demonstrate that they took reasonable measures to block Americans from using the service, they're homefree legally, and all that Big Media can do is go after American individuals who use the service (which they probably won't do, and may not even be able to do legally).

Is Border Control reasonable? Conceptually, it's a reasonable comprimise between usability and security. Anybody who knows what they're doing can use it, but then, I would hope that the more computer-savvy among us would be using their time more productively than TV. The implementation may suck, but that's probably mostly irrelevant legally (it will probably get fixed up with time).

We're now in a world were companies are forced to take measures they know will be ineffective, in order to satisfy legal requirements. It's not just the law that's moving too slowly (although it scares me even more when it moves too quickly)--society as a whole hasn't adjusted to the net. I can effectively "be" almost anywhere in the world in just a few seconds, at least to the extent that I can be doing things that are subject to the laws of different countries. The result is the vast number of logical inconsistancies and flaws in our social fabric.

The mess with intellectual property is one example. We've created an artificial scarcity of an unlimited resource (information) so that information will fit into traditional markets, which are the most efficient way of allocating scarce resources, but aren't so hot with unlimited resources.

It's funny that watching JumpTV from my place in Canada could be perfectly legal if I'm dialing into a Canadian ISP, but, if I forget to change my settings after a quick trip to the States, I could be committing a crime.

Just as a little tweak to all those Slashdotters south of the 49th parallel, have you noticed the recent trend towards greater 'Net freedom in Canada and less freedom in the US? I totally admire the US Constitution, and wish Canada had something just like it, but your government seems to be ignoring it more and more. By contrast, the Canadian government seems to be fairly with it when it comes to the Net. Here are some examples of Canadian freedom: the ruling that the CRTC (our FTC) can't regulate the 'Net, Ontario's encouraging citizens to use strong crypto, the CSE's Public Key Infrastructure project... The US has DMCA, COPA, COPPA, UCITA, and is also the home of the RIAA, the MPAA... Too bad about our taxes... Oh well, I guess you can always Blame Canada for all those copies of DeCSS hosted up here. :-)

To all the nitpicky karma whores: if you find some minute flaw in my post, please don't flame the hell out of me for it--use your imagination to figure out what I meant, and just read things that way. I am so bloody sick of getting a billion replies because some inconsequential detail of my post was slightly wrong. Show some adaptability. And yes, I know about the Canadian Charter of Rights. Not quite the same as the Constitution. The charter starts by saying "The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society."

I STILL think this is a really dumb idea...

> It figures out where you are (based on your IP)
> and then gives you television from you area (if
> its got it) in the form of a an online VCR.

Of course, I can get the local stations just using an antenna and my TV or my All-In-Wonder tuner.

What would be REALLY good is to be able to watch TV from Japan/Mexico/wherever they have _interesting_ shows, and that I would LOVE to be able to stream over the internet.

Of course, I suppose that people in other countries feel the same way about wanting to see American TV, which is what caused the whole problem with iCraveTV (since it interferes with the licensing fees US stations charge to foreign stations to be able to pay their shows).

Limiting the business plan to something that fits within the current legal situtation results (i.e., check location and only allow access to local stations), doesn't give any added value to what we have already. So, unless they have some other interesting ideas waiting in the wings, I can't really see them being able to attract too much interest.

I've got ONE word for you...

... proxies.

An (admittedly cursory) glance at bordercontrol.com suggests that the bulk of their screening is done based solely on a user's IP address. Even that database is probably fallible, but that's beside the point.

You can tunnel your request through a host in another country via SSH. You can use proxies for Web stuff. All you need to do is to find someone who'll let you use their box for this -- it'll probably be on a fairly small scale, as bandwidth isn't always cheap. (I've a friend in Vancouver who'd probably be quite glad to let me use his DSL line for this. :)

And it'll be hard as $PROFANITY to stop this -- how can they know that my bud isn't actually using the service himself, as opposed to routing traffic down to me in Missouri? And even if they get all draconian on us and start blocking individual users, I've got other friends in other jurisdictions...

This is not gonna work. Sorry, JumpTV, you'd better skip down to live 5 of your business plan ("take the money we made from naive investors on our IPO and buy a small island named after some dead French saint") real quick-like.