You’d think that, faced with a public that Fast Forwards through everything commercial that media companies would figure out (a) how to make commercials more appealing, or less obtrusive, or (b) another revenue model.
Instead, they’re simply cutting deals to not let Fast Forward work.
Walt Disney Co.’s two big TV networks, ABC and ESPN, have struck a deal with cable operator Cox Communications Inc. to offer hit shows and football games on demand, but with the unusual condition that Cox disables the fast-forward feature that allows viewers to skip ads, according to a media report Thursday.
The deal between Disney and Cox is expected to be announced today at the National Cable Television Association convention in Las Vegas, The Wall Street Journal reported in its online edition.
Cox, the nation’s third-largest cable operator with 6 million subscribers, was willing to nix fast-forwarding to gain access to popular ABC and ESPN content, the Journal said, adding that on-demand programming, aggressively rolled out by cable operators over the past three years, provides cable operators a competitive edge over satellite-TV providers such as DirecTV Group Inc. in the race for subscribers.
This only applies — at the moment — to On-Demand TV. But you can bet your bippy Big Media would love to have it apply to DVRs, too. Which is a great way to have people be irritated and cranky when watching your shows and the ad that advertisers are paying money for.
I get torqued enough at DVD material I can’t FF or Menu through. Normal TV stuff? Feh.
(via Battelle)
Have no fear friends… Linux is here. Well that is if the Media Co’s apply the “No Fast Forward” rule to DVR and cable boxes. Check out MythTV, or even better KnoppMyth. KnoppMyth is the OS and MythTV all in one great little package. The screenshots sold me for sure!
Not feeling adventuresome enough to try to cobble together my dream system, esp. when I suspect it would not take much maliciousness on the cable folks’ part to screw it up.
Actually one of the great things about KnoppMyth (and Linux in general) is that you don’t need a nice system to run it. To create a PVR box all you need is a Pentium 3 or higher, a nice TV tuner card, and at least 320gb of storage.
Using the cheapest CPU on the market you could prolly build a PVR for $500 without spare parts and under $300 with spare parts. Both of which are what you would spend on a PVR from Best Buy which uses a proprietary format for storing the media. Nice thing about MythTV is everything is stored in MPEG format, which most DVD players will play.
On the other hand, as part of my digital cable bill, I get a PVR for free that Comcast will fix if it blows up. Granted, it’s a mediocre PVR, but it’s “free.” 🙂
Until they start screwing around with my FF …