[IP] Downloading Television, Legal or Otherwise
Downloading Television, Legal or Otherwise
posted by Henry Jenkins @ 8/17/2004 9:20:53 PM
<http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/blog.asp?blogID=1530&trk=nl>
Salon’s tech reporter Farhad Marjoo
<http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/08/11/must_download_tv/
index.html> recently posted a thoughtful discussion of the current
state of television downloads. The center piece of the article is a
discussion of a recent FCC decision which cleared the way for TiVo, the
digital recorder folks, to offer a new service-TiVoToGo-which allows
one to transfer digitally recorded content from your TiVo machine
across the internet to your PC or to another TiVo. The service comes
with plenty of hardware to make it difficult for the content to be
shared with family or friends, let alone the general public, but it
does represent a real convenience for folks like me who travel and want
to catch up with their favorite shows. What I also want is a simple way
to tell my TiVo from the road to tape shows I discover, say, reading a
newspaper or magazine on the flight.
From here, the story goes on to look at a variety of strategies being
adopted to share television content on the Web-which is as legal or
illegal as downloading any other copyrighted content.
Reading the article got me off on one of my pet pipe dreams-reruns on
demand. We can get there legally or illegally. The article describes
the illegal route-connect enough television fans up using BitTorrent
and RSS-and let them rip, burn, and trade your content. Or create a
simple system where I can pay per view to watch episodes of television
series while they are still on the air and still relevant in the
culture. Right now, television producers are making a lot of money
bundling together episodes from past seasons onto DVD and selling them.
It used to be taken for granted that no one would pay for content that
had been offered for free. Wrong. It was also assumed that selling
content would interfere with ratings for reruns or interest in
syndication packages. The success of Sex and the City in syndication
after years of access on DVD would seem to disprove this. The next step
is to sell me the content immediately after it airs, so if word of
mouth builds on a new series, fans can go back and catch up on the
episodes they missed, rather than waiting for rerun season and probably
forgetting about it. Personally, I'd also love to be able to
cherry-pick series off Showtime and HBO without having to subscribe to
the whole network. I might in the end give them more money rather than
less but I'd be paying for the content I wanted to see. Give it to me
in a cheap, easy, timely, and legal fashion and there's no reason for
illegal downloads.
Archives at: <http://Wireless.Com/Dewayne-Net>
Weblog at: <http://weblog.warpspeed.com>
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