Archive for February, 2009

Why Pirating TV Will Not Be Widespread Any Time Soon

Posted in TV, Movies, Music, and Why They All Suck on February 21, 2009 by themaroon

I saw this article on NewTeeVee today contending that Hulu’s recent developments, like the Boxee removal I covered in my last post, might be driving customers back to piracy. It shows a fundamental misunderstanding of why piracy works so well for music, and why it is still a much smaller problem with TV shows than with songs for a number of reasons.

1. Most of the content (barring some HBO and Showtime stuff) is free anyway, and cable is incredibly convenient.

2. You don’t download a TV show once and then consume it over and over, like a CD. You have to get a new one every week (or in some cases, every day) and you watch it once and then delete it. The ratio of effort to reward is considerably higher. There are ways to do this reduce the effort a bit (such as RSS downloading) but they still suck because…

3. Getting the content digitized and put online is a much bigger hassle. With music, you pop a CD in and wait 3 minutes. eDonkey or whatever the kids use these days automatically starts sharing. With TV, you have to buy a tuner for your pc, hook that up to cable, record the program using some software (all of which sucks, and I’ve tried them all) edit out commercials, create a torrent file, etc.

4. The end result of pirating a video is generally a DivX file. The percentage of the population that knows what to do with one of those, let alone how to get it onto a television, is small and not growing quickly.

Anyone who downloads TV shows via RSS (as I do) knows that it’s highly unreliable. In fact, the pain of piracy often drives me to Hulu.

It’s also a mistake to assume that Hulu doesn’t want to end up on TVs because they don’t want to be featured in Boxee. Boxee still runs only on computers, and any computer with Boxee can run Hulu. Boxee right now isn’t a better way to get on televisions than the browser.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see TVs start shipping with built in Hulu support. Or given that Hulu is part-owned by NBC, a long time partner of Microsoft, it could easily end up on the Xbox 360. The Hulu guys aren’t stupid. They know that their future lies beyond just the PC. And they know that they exist only because of the legal advantage that allows them to be more convenient. They just want to ensure that when they get there, they do so on their terms, not a third party’s as happened to the music industry. They don’t want to escape the same piracy concerns dragging the record labels under just to end up a slaves to Apple, or more likely someone like Boxee.

Still, piracy is a non-factor to Hulu. Consider iTunes, which charges for music and has made inroads against widespread music piracy by offering convenience. The convenience Hulu offers, relative to pirating video, is ten times the amount iTunes does relative to pirating music, and Hulu doesn’t charge a cent. It’s pretty hard to make a case that any of their recent policies are going to change the overall direction online video is moving in.

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Boxee: The Networks' Biggest Threat

Posted in TV, Movies, Music, and Why They All Suck on February 18, 2009 by themaroon

Fascinating story about Hulu and Boxee here. As usual, I’ll voice my dissenting opinion and say that Hulu is doing the right thing.

Boxee, for those who don’t know, is a service that aggregates certain video from all around the web into one media center-like experience. It’s sort of like having a TiVo that has (at least until Friday) unlimited access to lots of top quality content, and minus all the useless crap that comprises the majority of content on other video sites.

Content owners, like Hulu, generally found this less objectionable (or so the theory went) than simply stealing the content, since Boxee preserved any advertisements within it. It acted more like an RSS reader than the good old pirate-laden days of YouTube.

It’s tempting to pass Hulu’s request off as old media dinosaurs not understanding new technology, but Hulu itself (a joint venture between two of them) seems to disprove that. That site is a damn near perfect mixture of old media and new delivery methods. If NBC and especially Fox seem to get it, and if they are objecting, there’s a reason. They must fear something happening if services like Boxee are allowed to grow.

There are a few obvious disadvantages to Boxee for Hulu. They lose the ability to run display ads alongside content, which they don’t seem to do yet anyway, but may one day. And, perhaps more importantly, they lose the ability to track people around the web using standard browser cookies (which presumably don’t work on Boxee since it isn’t in a browser) which can be used to target ads and increase revenue rates.

But all of that still might not be enough for them to feel the need to pull the plug. My theory is that they fear Boxee growing large and offering an end-run around the networks for content producers. They’re already pissed that YouTube got as big as it did, almost entirely due to their content, but YouTube is at least too mired in music videos and losers screaming “Leave Britney alone!” into webcams to pose a serious threat to the networks. They’re just not where you turn for high quality content.

Not so with Boxee, they’re playing Facebook to YouTube’s MySpace. They’re building the endless TiVo, with dozens of hand-picked, high-quality channels, and one they plan on integrating with existing hardware like televisions and DVRs and gaming consoles. They will, if they’re successful, deliver professionally-produced content to millions of people.

From the networks’ standpoint, that’s not a good thing. It shifts the balance of power. Currently if a Hollywood producer decides to make a television show, he’s got only a few major networks and a handful of cable ones (most of which are owned by the same companies as the majors) to shop it around to. Put Boxee in a few successful TVs and DVRs, and you’ve got a viable new network right there. Put them in 100 million homes and computers and you’ve got a monster.

The networks are nothing more than a middleman between the people who make content and the ones who consume it, and they know it. And like all middlemen, they lie awake at night hoping the people on the ends don’t find a way to cut them out. The relatively slow bandwidth in most of the first world and the lack, until recently, of internet-connected hardware attached to televisions has relegated online video to little more than kittens on treadmills, but the writing is on the wall.

Hulu is the networks’ best chance to keep control of the middle ground, and Boxee is a direct threat to that. Their streaming hundreds of thousands of Hulu videos per week seems like a gift right now, but it’s a Trojan horse and the networks know it.

I expect we’ll be seeing a lot more from Hulu in the future. They’ll be in all of the same places Boxee wants to end up. In your TV, on your Wii and iPhone. Removing their content from Boxee is the first salvo in the battle to retain control of the middle ground, and one they have to win to ensure their survival.

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The Market Prevents Itself

Posted in bidness on February 12, 2009 by themaroon

I often read articles supporting the free market these days with a grin on my face. For instance The Audacity of Doing Nothing by Philip Greenspun, whose blog I enjoy, in which he opines that the government should more or less let our current financial woes work themselves out.

I don’t know enough about economics to really have a strong opinion one way or the other there, but what really made me smile was this paragraph:

What did these guys want the government to do?  Nothing, basically.  “Back in the 19th Century, there were a lot of steep crashes, guys got wiped out, and the economy came back quickly.”  What’s different now?  The government is a lot bigger and more powerful.  Rich companies and people can put some of their wealth into lobbying and demand that the government prevent them from getting wiped out (or at least slow the process).

The circular pattern there is astounding. The government is choosing bold action over free capitalism because they’re being lobbied to do so by big corporations and extremely wealthy individuals, who are themselves the inevitable byproduct of capitalism. If Greenspun is right, the market is preventing itself.

Our nation has been locked for decades in a never-ending argument of big government vs. free capitalism. Is it possible that the latter must always lead to the former? Wouldn’t a free market always spawn corporations and robber barons who would then use lobbying bucks to influence government to create regulations in their favor? Anti-lobbying regulations are nothing but market regulations, since they effectively control where a corporation can or cannot invest. Perhaps a free market is a self-defeating concept, destined, in the event one should ever form, to wink out of existence in a few nanoseconds like a tiny black hole in a particle accelerator.

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The Gray Lady

Posted in bidness on February 9, 2009 by themaroon

I’m reading this story about the New York Times possibly charging for online access to their newspaper in the future and I’m nodding my head. This is what I’ve been saying for years. There’s a difference between traffic and profit, and when it comes to business the latter makes a much better scoreboard than the former.

Already I’m seeing comments pop up that “this will be the death of the Times”. No, it won’t. Not doing this will, their results over the last couple years have essentially proven that. Selling content online may not save them either, but it may, and if it doesn’t it won’t be what killed them.

The problem in many people’s thinking is the belief that there’s always a magic business model lurking around the corner that will circumvent the normal laws of capitalism just because the internet’s involved. There isn’t. Reducing marginal costs certainly opens up a few doors to businesses, but it doesn’t mean that any product can suddenly be profitably supported by advertising alone.

“Let’s find a way to do Class A journalism on such a low budget that we can profit off of advertising” might just be equivalent to “Let’s find a way to have an online shoe store where we give the shoes away and make money off of advertising.” It may not be possible, and a lot of the people I know in the tech world really need to open their minds to that. I’m not saying I’m certain for news in particular, though the evidence is certainly pointing in that direction, but there’s some chance that the expense of providing high quality journalism (for which there is always high demand) or video or social networking or whatever else is simply greater than the reward for any business model other than charging customers directly.

And if I’m right and it’s not possible, then what’s going to happen is one by one every free content site that tries to go the quality route (rather than the blog-style breaking news with little or no real insight one) is going to shut down. NYT realizes this, and that their quality comes with a price tag that ensures they’d be among the first. So they’re trying something different.

I pray for us that it works.

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It’s About Material Impact

Posted in Are Religious People Stupid? on February 7, 2009 by themaroon

Paul Graham’s latest essay, Keep Your Identity Small, says that the reason arguments over religion or politics tend to get so heated (relative to one about baking) is that those particular topics are seen as part of people’s identity. I don’t doubt that that’s part of it, but I’m not convinced it’s the major differentiator. I think the reason those two topics get participants so worked up is that other people’s opinions, unlike most topics, have a material impact on our lives.

If two people disagree over how long to bake a cake, it’s not a big deal because both can simply ignore the other and bake theirs the way they always have. The result of any argument that could possibly arise is relatively insignificant to both parties. Change the argument to whether or not the government should spend $800 billion buying up toxic mortgage-backed instruments from banks, and now we’re talking about something that could have broad ramifications on our lives going forward, and the party whose argument loses has to live with the results, good or bad, just as much as the one that comes out the victor.

As I showed in my popular post Why Anti-God Books Sell Well religion is an even clearer case than politics in this regard, at least in my country where separation of church and state is still largely fiction. Pretend for a moment that you’re an atheist. Here are some ways other people’s religious views have affected you over the last 8 years.

1. George W. Bush got elected twice with the swing vote being cast by the religious right. I’ll leave whether or not this was a good thing up to the reader (though I’ll assure you that you’ll have an easier time finding a unicorn than an atheist Bush supporter) but suffice it to say, the result had a tremendous effect an all Americans, most of whom, according to polling data, consider it largely negative.

2. George W. Bush has stymied stem cell research, by executive order, arguably the most promising avenue of medical progress, for the last 8 years. Remember, for this thought experiment you’re an atheist, so you don’t have any religious problem with using frozen embryos that would otherwise have been destroyed anyway to attempt to cure horrible diseases like cancer and MS. You may be a libertarian or just general free-market capitalist and therefore opposed to any government-sponsored scientific funding, but Bush didn’t cut that off, he just diverted it away from stem cell research to other things by effectively banning it.

This means that if stem cell research delivers on even a fraction of its promise, Bush’s delay, caused by his religious belief that life begins at conception, effectively prevented science from saving potentially millions of lives. If it set research back, say, 4 years total, and that research one day cures breast cancer, then everyone who died in the 4 years before the cure is finalized would not have if not for Bush’s religious beliefs. (I realize I’m greatly oversimplifying the way science in general and stem cell research in particular works here for the sake of expediency, but you get what I mean.)

3. Voters’ religious views have denied gays the right to marry in most of the country. Again, you’re an atheist for this thought experiment, so you don’t have any divine book telling you homosexuality is a sin, so it seems to you like a rather straightforward case of denying people their basic rights. (If atheist Bush supporters are hard to come by, try finding ones opposed to gay marriage.)

Those are just a quick three off the top of my head. The point is that the religious beliefs of the majority of voters have incredibly strong effects on everyone else. The baking practices of everyone else have absolutely no bearing on my corn muffins. (Thank God too, because my corn muffins are amazing.)

This is actually a somewhat testable hypothesis. If I’m correct, what you’d see is that politics lead to heated arguments everywhere (check) and that religion tends to do so at least somewhat less frequently in areas with greater separation of church and state. The former is clearly true, the latter has been as well in my highly unscientific observation. I’ve generally seen Europeans appear to be much less uptight about the topic, except where Islam is concerned in some nations that have experienced significant terrorism, but that’s something entirely different.

It might be interesting to post the same religious threads in forums and social news sites frequented predominantly by Western Europeans, then do the same in American ones, then somehow try to measure the amount of animosity. It’s a tough job (especially since Europeans are often so well-mannered and seemingly calm when arguing relative to us brutish Americans) but I’d love to see the results.

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