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June 21, 2006
Those thieving TV viewers
How are we to interpret the Australian TV networks' continuing war against the Personal Video Recorder community? As this article reveals, the Nine Network is intent on crippling PVRs and Microsoft's Windows Media Centre Edition, and like them, Ten and Seven are fiercely resisting publishing an Electronic Program Guide.
The comments from Seven spokesman Simon Francis are quite revealing: 'If [an EPG] is developed, it must come with assurances and conditions," network spokesman Simon Francis says. "Precise start times (in an EPG) would allow people to burn DVDs of our programs like crazy and push them out over the Internet."
He must be dreaming, surely?
The sort of people who are interested in burning DVDs like crazy and pushing them out over the Internet [why would they bother burning DVDs if they planned to push content out over the internet?] aren't going to be deterred by not having an EPG. Wouldn't they simply record everything, then cut them up into programs? And any EPG that doesn't have precise start times isn't much of an EPG. You'd still have to pad out recordings, so what, precisely, is the point?
The truth is that they're not really trying to frustrate pirates. They're trying to frustrate the average viewer. The aim is to make it as difficult as possible for them to avoid the commercials.
As Ice TV's Peter Vogel points out, they would be far better off taking a share of the EPG revenue. They would have been even better off backing a local TiVo operation, and taking a share of both the hardware and the ongoing services. The reason they didn't do either can only be attributed to a form of hubris. They really believed they could hold back the tide of technology, aided by the eagerness of successive Australian governments to do their bidding. It won't work this time. Not even in Australia.
It will be interesting to see how much money the networks are prepared to burn trying to resist the inevitable.
Posted by cw at June 21, 2006 11:51 AM
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Comments
Underestatement Eddie at your own cost! I would bet you your left nad that Eddie has an extremely good reason to not have the guide. Eddie understands technology and I would expect to see something in the next year or so.
Molly
Posted by: Phillip Molly Malone at June 21, 2006 02:22 PM
Yet another reason we're behind the rest of the world! I lived for a long time in the US, and loved my Tivo. Since I moved back here a year and half ago, I haven't bothered to watch TV - somehow I can no longer bear to be held hostage to the network's schedule.
Hopefully, the community will find a way around the networks' stubbornness and I can rejoin the TV watching community. In the meantime, I'll stick to torrents.
Posted by: Colin J at June 21, 2006 03:56 PM
What a transparently spurious argument (by the Seven exec). What balderdash. What sort of mugs do they think we are?
First, as Charles says, there's nothing stopping people recording off air right now and distributing over the net. And any decent pirate will at least top and tail the program and cut out the ads (and I'm yet to see an EPG able to support ad-editing).
Second: it's not like the networks stick to their schedules in the first place! Any PVR or VCR owner knows that you need to pad the end of a recording by at least 20 minutes (during peak viewing periods) to have a good chance of getting a whole show.
Yes, it's all a cynical exercise to try to force us to watch the advertisements. And I suppose we should be glad that the ads are there, otherwise we wouldn't get much content in the first place.
Personally, as an ICE-equipped PVR (Topfield) owner, I'm pretty happy with the way things are right now. ICE gives me reasonably accurate schedules, and the PBK TAP (on the Topfield) lets me skip ads super quickly. I dread the day when advertisements change and become somehow more integrated into the programs - then we'll need some new, innovative technology to get around them.
By the way, did you notice that ICE have cancelled their float? Their press release says that as a result of the Nine Network legal action, awareness has grown and sales have picked up. More power to them!
Posted by: Richard at June 21, 2006 04:06 PM
I don't think the big media players in Australia have ever gone up against the REALLY big global players like M$. They are used to dominating whatever they come up against (i.e. politicians and small local players). I'd like to see them wage war on m$ media centre.
Posted by: Alex at June 21, 2006 07:27 PM
Nice to think 9 will have something worth
taping!
Posted by: Glen at June 21, 2006 10:24 PM
I have been running a PVR at home for over a year. I record the programs I want to watch from the digital broadcast. I often watch these live anyway but being able to go out and not worry about missing an episode in a series I like to watch is nice, and I don't have to have a tape ready to do it.
In all this time and 100's of hours of recordings I have only once put one of the recordings onto disk for my sister, who has a faulty vcr at the moment. VCR's are legal, so why are PVR's considered otherwise? This is the age of the digital revolution and yet you can't obtain a legal version of the episode guide? Do they believe that I will sit up until almost midnight to watch star-trek or scrubs or F1 'cause that's when they want to put it on air and then I am supposed to be a wonderful minimum-wage worker negotiating AWA's at 5am the next day? I do it cause their 'programming' doesn't fit with my lifestyle, ads or otherwise.
Posted by: Rex at June 22, 2006 10:22 AM
Reckon you grossly OVERestimate McGuire, PMM. Mark Day had an interesting piece on him in The Australian today.
Posted by: Stuart at June 22, 2006 01:27 PM