Category: Networking

Piracy is Good? How Battlestar Galactica Killed Broadcast TV

Mindjack – Piracy is Good? How Battlestar Galactica Killed Broadcast TV
Very interesting and thorough article about recent trends in downloading television programming.

From the article:
Now we have a paradox: the invention of an incredibly powerful mechanism for the global distribution of television programming brings with it a fundamental challenge to the business model which pays for the creation of the programs themselves. This is not at all BitTorrent’s fault: the technology could have come along a decade ago, and if it had, we’d have stumbled across this paradox in the 1990s. This is a failure of the value chain to adapt to a changing technological landscape — a technological desynchronization between producer and audience. Once again, there’s no need to find fault: things have changed so much, and so quickly, I doubt that anyone could have kept up. But the future is now here, and everyone in the creative value chain from producer to audience must adapt to it.

Network Neutrality

Free Press : Press Release
From the report:
“Congress should enact tough new laws prohibiting cable and telephone companies from blocking consumer access to content and services on the Internet, bilking both consumers and Internet-based companies,” said Jeannine Kenney, senior policy analyst at Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports magazine. “If they don’t, these big companies will use their market power to line their pockets by discriminating against competitors in favor of their own content and service offerings.”

I completely agree.

Hopefully, if Congress doesn’t do something, the marketplace will.

Here is an idea: http://www.freepress.net/news/13403

The end of broadcast as we know it…

The Doc Searls Weblog : Friday, January 6, 2006
Doc writes:
The meta-story behind Intel’s Viiv and Clickstream announcments yesterday is not just the death of TV as we know it, but the gang-stabbing of it by Intel, Apple and their new partners in the broadcasting and entertainment industries. Or, if you prefer, by the reconstituted entertainment industry, which will still be about production and distribution, but without the current channel-based TV system (which will come to an FCC-mandated end in 2009 — it was originally scheduled for 2006 — when every TV station will be required to move off its branded VHF channel and up to some unbranded UHF digital channel, by which time nearly everybody will stop watching over-the-air TV anyway, getting everything we used to call TV over cable, satellite or Internet).

Epeus’ epigone – Kevin Marks weblog
Kevin Marks Follows Up with:
In 1998, I went to work at Apple on QuickTime, and started work on live streaming. This was hard work, but interesting – making a personal TV Transmitter for anyone with a Mac, so they could use the internet for lots of people to watch them at once. Having built this technology, I started looking for uses for it, and was rather bemused to find there weren’t any.

The problem was storage again. It was always better to have a locally stored copy of the video than to try to get it over the net in real time. It just didn’t use the net efficiently, and the ‘buffering’ experience really sucked. In fact, what I realised was that live TV was a waste of time too. But now we had enough storage.

People spend lots of money on iPods and TiVo’s, whose whole purpose is to turn live streams into files so you can pause and skip them, moving the storage into their houses, and pockets. This personal storage is why Podcasting makes sense.

Downloading is always better than streaming, and Edited better than Live, except in one instance.

That difference is when you have 2-way interaction. When you can speak back to the person at the other end, either via iChat AV or Skype, or just by having a textual back channel to a conference.

That’s where Live is needed.

EXACTLY!

Reinventing TV

Release 1.0 / Publication / Reinventing TV: Network TV Signs Off. Networked TV Logs On.
Scott Kirsner write in an older Release 1.0 about Networked TV. It is a good article, too bad it costs so much.

From the abstract:
Television, because of its high production and distribution costs and FCC regulation, has always been the most massive of all the mass media. It seeks the middle ground, and usually finds it. The ads that accompany today’s shows are made with a similar shotgun mentality: There’s no such thing as one-to-one marketing on the tube. Any niche-oriented programming that does exist tends to be available only to small audiences, on obscure satellite channels or community cable access stations.
That will change over the next decade, as a growing number of television sets, PCs and mobile devices are connected to what Jeremy Allaire, the founder of Brightcove, has dubbed “the Internet of video.” Plugging TV into IP rather than into a terrestrial cable system or a fleet of geosynchronous satellites, could redeem – or at least reinvigorate – the medium. The hermetically sealed world of television is about to be cracked open and rewired, transformed into an open publishing platform as a variety of new devices and services emerge to make independent video content easier – and perhaps even profitable – to produce and distribute to smaller subsets of the population.

The Future of Independent Media

GBN: The Future of Independent Media
I thought I linked to this a while ago but I couldn’t find it recently when recommending it to a student.

Andrew Blau writes a great essay contemplating Independent Media in the face of the quickly changing technological landscape. A very good read:

From the text:
The technologies that enable us to make and consume motion media are becoming better, cheaper, and more widely available—and with blistering speed. As a consequence, patterns of media production and consumption are changing just as rapidly. The Internet continues to create new opportunities to connect with audiences. Video games are becoming a platform for critique and education. A new generation of media makers and viewers is emerging, which only increases the likelihood of profound change. Images, ideas, news, and points of view are traveling along countless new routes to an ever-growing number of places where they can be seen and absorbed. It is no understatement to say that the way we make and experience motion media will be transformed as thoroughly in the next decade as the world of print was reshaped in the last.

Content for P2P about P2P (almost)

THE.SCENE
From the FAQ:
Q: What is “The Scene” in real life?

A: The Scene is the piracy underground where 99% of pirated movies, songs, video games, etc start out. There, thousands of pirates upload, download, and trade files (often illegally) using FTP sites. From there, the files make their way onto the peer-to-peer networks, that so many know and love.