It's Television: Dissected
TV News, Reviews and Interviews
A few weeks ago I talked about how Brett’s Special Fancy (the internet proxy and not the biscuit) didn’t really work so well anymore and how there was a new option.
It took me a while to hunt through my notes and find what I was talking about but here is a tutorial about using proxy system Hotspot Shield to view Hulu and it may also work for other sites.
Let us know in the comments if this works for you or if you have other ways around this problem.
In a move that shows that TV networks might actually, finally, understand the way the world works, this was reported in the New York Times:
NBC Universal, acknowledging that viewers are increasingly moving away from traditional television viewing, announced plans today for a service that will make popular NBC programs available to download free to personal computers and other devices.
Then again, it says that the files will expire after seven days which means there’s some kind of ridiculous DRM present.
What do you think? Will this be another horrible failure? Has anybody been following the iTunes store debacle?
If you’re ISP throttles your peer-to-peer traffic and hinders you from getting at all that wonderful TV, you might want to have a look at this article from Wired.
Apparently there are ways to get around the problems.
via LifeHacker
In the typical way of Telstra, Australia’s former public telecommunications organisation is proposing rolling out infrastructure that is already outdated in other countries. While they try to sell the dream of Fibre-to-the-Node (FTTN) technology as the latest, greatest internet connectivity, countries including Japan and the US are running the fibre-optic cables right up to the front door of users, giving massively more bandwidth than is possible through FTTN.
From The Age’s Business Day, here are a few interesting tidbits on Telstra’s anti-competitive assholery:
PHIL Burgess has again shown that he is not across the facts of broadband in this country, or continues to deliberately distort facts and reality to the point of completely misrepresenting the situation.
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More recently, Telstra executives said the company would not give anyone else the information needed to build a fibre network. Then they said that Telstra had locked up the contractors that can build a fibre network. And there have been threats of suing the Government, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and the G9 companies if they were granted access to the copper sub-loop to interconnect their network.
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But why does that not bother Burgess and his fellow Telstra executives? To people in the telecommunications industry it is clear. The purpose of Telstra’s FTTN scheme is to strand and torch the investments of its competitors. It is a tactic designed to totally distort competition and restore monopoly. It’s not about delivering broadband benefits to consumers. Telstra’s plan is to remove certainty around infrastructure investment decisions with the end-game of rendering competitive infrastructure redundant and worthless. The plan has no regard for the interests of consumers.
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Government policy and the work of the ACCC has led to significant deployment of high-speed broadband by a great number of service providers, including Optus, Telstra and Primus. And consumers continue to reap the benefits of an open and competitive industry. Many consumers already have access to high-speed broadband. This is despite Telstra executives choosing not to release high-speed products. Telstra previously advised it had already built a nationwide ADSL2+ network but wouldn’t release it to the public unless the Government changed some of the laws the Telstra executives didn’t like. These laws have been in place a long time and it’s all credit to the Government for not backing down.
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It is a fact that competition policy delivers benefits to consumers. Telstra was given custodianship of the monopoly network — a national asset — with the clear understanding that competition required access to that national asset. It was also clearly understood that Telstra would provide access to that national asset on fair and reasonable terms.
This came to me from Robert Boxcutter – thought it may help some of you who still use iTunes.
I know you don’t use iTunes anymore but this might be useful to put on the Boxcutters blog for people who have the occasional problem. You know how iTunes sometimes stuffs up and only downloads a portion of a podcast then it won’t let you download it again because it thinks you’ve already got it. Well if you collapse the list of the particular podcast in question then hold Shift on a PC or Option on a Mac then expand it again it will update the list and show you all the ones that you’ve deleted or need to re-download.
From The Age:
TV program delays ‘turning viewers into pirates’
Huge delays in airing overseas TV shows locally are turning Australians into pirates, says a study conducted by technology lawyer and researcher Alex Malik.
It took an average of 17 months for programs to be shown in Australia after first airing overseas, a gap that has only increased over the past two years, the study found.
The findings were based on a “representative sample of 119 current or recent free-to-air TV series or specials”, said Malik, who is in the final stages of a PhD in law at the University of Technology Sydney.
He was previously a legal counsel for the Australian Recording Industry Association, as well as a senior legal officer at the Australian Communications and Media Authority.
Malik admitted there had been some signs of progress recently – programs such as The O.C. air within days of being shown in the US – but he insisted the overall delays had become longer.
“Over the past two years, average Australian broadcast delays for free-to-air television viewers have more than doubled from 7.6 to 16.7 months,” the study reads.
Malik also studied comments by TV viewers on various internet forums, and concluded: “These delays are one of the major factors driving Australians to use BitTorrent and other internet-based peer-to-peer programs to download programs illegally from overseas, prior to their local broadcast.”
He goes on to criticise Australian broadcasters for their apparent unwillingness to allow shows to be downloaded legally online.
“While film and music content owners have increasingly attempted to cater for digital consumers … Australian TV networks continue to appear to be unable or unwilling to change their programming policies or provide new digital based options for consumers unwilling to wait to view their favourite TV programs.”
Overseas, services such as Apple’s iTunes Store offer downloads of numerous shows from most of the major US networks, but this is not yet possible in Australia.
Network Ten is making some headroom here – its recently revamped website will soon offer entire programs for download as soon as they air, said Damien Smith, the network’s general manager of digital media.
“For some programs there will be the availability of full episodes, for others it will be highlights and short clips, for other programs it will be additional web-only content,” he said.
Ten has already experimented with TV show downloads, recently offering the series two premiere of Supernatural as a free download five days before its first airing.
ABC also offers a number of its shows for streaming through its website.
I was most interested to discover that the average delay had increased, from 7.6 to 16.7 months in just the last two years. The impression is that the networks have been aware of the problems of the world becoming a smaller place with increasing connectivity – and I’m sure this is at least in part due to the crowing they do about showing episodes so soon after they go to air in the US – but it seems the opposite is the reality.
BB
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