Vizio’s technology works by analyzing snippets of the shows you’re watching, whether on traditional television or streaming Internet services such as Netflix. Vizio determines the date, time, channel of programs — as well as whether you watched them live or recorded. The viewing patterns are then connected your IP address - the Internet address that can be used to identify every device in a home, from your TV to a phone.

This is a damn good reason not to buy a Vizio TV. I won’t rant about opt-out/opt-in again. But I found Vizio generally had a good price-to-quality ratio: not top shelf hardware, but not top shelf prices, either. So this shadiness is a shame.

A shamey-ness?

Anyway, props to Samsung and LG, who, according to Julia Angwin at ProPublica, require user consent before enabling the sort of tracking Vizio turns on by default.

Disable Vizio "Smart Interactivity"

Vizio obviously knows how shady its default spying is because they have a page named after the feature which begins with information on how to turn it off:

VIA TV Interface

Press the MENU button on your TV's remote.
Select Settings.
Highlight Smart Interactivity.
Press RIGHT arrow to change setting to Off.

VIA Plus TV Interface

Press the MENU button on your TV's remote or open HDTV Settings app.
Select System.
Select Reset & Admin.
Highlight Smart Interactivity.
Press RIGHT arrow to change setting to Off.

30 Apr 2015 // 15:42

Popcorn Time, Netflix, HBO and the future of digital media

This story about a U.K. court ordering Popcorn Time blocked has been knocking around in my brain for a couple of days now. When stuff knocks around in my head for days, chances are it will end up in written form, right here. So here we go.

It is not an absurd ruling, although I certainly take issue with the claim that, as the MPAA alleged, Popcorn Time “has no legitimate purpose and it only serves to infringe copyright.” There are plenty of places to find legal torrents. I know most people are using Popcorn Time for piracy though, because they ask me if it is illegal, since it “seems a lot like Netflix.”

It is definitely illegal to use Popcorn Time or any other software to download, disseminate, view or otherwise consume any movie, song or other media for which you would otherwise have to pay money.

This is the insightful bit of the article, though:

For media companies, stamping out Popcorn Time has been a virtually impossible task. The free, open-source apps, originally created by an anonymous group of developers in Argentina, are now hosted on multiple sites and allegedly have several hundred volunteer programmers working on various iterations, including mobile versions of the apps.

Here is an interactive version of the graph displayed above, showing worldwide search volume from the preceding twelve months:

//www.google.com/trends/embed.js?hl=en-US&q=netflix,+HBO,+Popcorn+Time&date=today+12-m&cmpt=q&tz&tz&content=1&cid=TIMESERIES_GRAPH_0&export=5&w=700&h=400

Netflix is doing just fine, for now. But HBO, excepting a bump in mid-April coinciding with the increased promotion of their new HBO Now service, is losing ground to Popcorn Time in worldwide search.

Here is the same type of search volume comparison, but this time zoomed in to the preceding 90 days and including only HBO and Popcorn Time:

//www.google.com/trends/embed.js?hl=en-US&q=HBO,+Popcorn+Time&date=today+3-m&cmpt=q&tz&tz&content=1&cid=TIMESERIES_GRAPH_0&export=5&w=700&h=400

HBO does not have as wide a lead as Netflix, but the time to react to stiff competition is not after that compeitition has matched or overtaken you. For Netflix and HBO, that time is right now. Netflix has massive infrastructure and an increasingly impressive library of original productions. And HBO has NBO Now, uh, now, which unbundles the premium channel from cable subscriptions. These are both good reactions to the rise of competitors, legitimate and otherwise. But those strategies are not enough.

The takeaway? Popcorn Time has become similar to Anonymous or, albeit a more controversial comparison, Al Qaeda. That is, it is not a single organization answering to a traditional leadership hierarchy. It is a splintered collection of rogue outfits, some more law-respecting than others, none “in charge.” It may represent the next step in business strategy companies like Netflix and HBO will need to take to continue their success.

The person or company that comes up with a way to legally and technically monetize torrent consumption of popular media at scale will be the next Mark Zuckerberg or Google.¹

Now, if you will excuse me I am going to go think about how to legally and technically monetize torrent consumption of popular media at scale.

I hope that, unlike Mark Zuckerberg and Google, they do not premise their business model on the erosion of privacy norms. ↩

10 Dec 2014 // 10:04

HBO without cable confirmed for April 2015

Finally, although HBO’s decision to use MLB Advanced Media instead of HBO’s own streaming tech prompted CTO and former Xbox executive Otto Berkes to resign.

15 Oct 2014 // 13:54

HBO without cable coming in 2015

Peter Kafka reports at Recode:

[HBO CEO Richard] Plepler said the company will go “beyond the wall” and launch a “stand alone, over the top” version of HBO in the US next year, and would work with “current partners,” and may work with others as well. But he wouldn’t provide any other detail.

Plepler has been pondering this possibility for a while, and a couple of years ago I did some back-of-the-napkin math which suggested there is a lot of money to be had in a web-only subscription.

I’m not known for my math skills, but it looks like I was on to something.

Correction: This post has been updated because I originally stated the year HBO plans to launch its web-only offering as 2014 in the link at the top, instead of 2015, which is the correct year. Sorry folks.

26 Aug 2013 // 13:09

Kevin Spacey knows what viewers want

Actor Kevin Spacey, speaking at the James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival:

Clearly the success of the Netflix model – releasing the entire season of House Of Cards at once – has proved one thing: the audience wants control. They want freedom. If they want to binge – as they’ve been doing on House Of Cards – then we should let them binge.

It’s so simple, and while Netflix and a few others have learned the lesson the music industry so painfully failed to learn for so long, the television industry still fails to recognize and adapt to the dissipation of distinctions between which piece of glass is glowing with their product.

2 Apr 2013 // 09:48

HBO exec laments piracy of low-quality editions of 'Game of Thrones'

HBO exec laments piracy of low-quality editions of ‘Game of Thrones’

HBO programming president Michael Lombardo, speaking to Entertainment Weekly's James Hibberd:

The production values of this show are so incredible. So I’m hoping that in the purloined different generation of cuts that the show is holding up.

More good news for those of us hoping something will change as far as non-cable TV subscription access to the massively popular show and the HBO stable in general.

1 Apr 2013 // 13:01

2nd Circuit: Aereo streaming of individual over-the-air TV feeds via internet doesn't violate copyright law

2nd Circuit: Aereo streaming of individual over-the-air TV feeds via internet doesn’t violate copyright law

The Second Circuit has held in WNET v Aereo (PDF) that sending a unique stream of over-the-air TV signal to customers via the internet isn’t a copyright violation.

Aereo assign each of its subscribers their own personal antenna and stream to comply with a previous Second Circuit decision. In other words, Aereo could provide its service with one antenna, but it needs to use one for every subscriber. The use of one antenna for all subscribers, as the Second Circuit held in its 2008 Cablevision opinion, would likely constitute an unlawful public performance.

Judge Chin says in his dissent that he isn’t pleased by this technique:

Aereo’s “technology platform” is, however, a sham. The system employs thousands of individual dime-sized antennas, but there is no technologically sound reason to use a multitude of tiny individual antennas rather than one central antenna; indeed, the system is a Rube Goldberg-like contrivance, over-engineered in an attempt to avoid the reach of the Copyright Act and to take advantage of a perceived loophole in the law.

Aereo’s technology isn’t an attempt to avoid the reach of the Act. It’s an attempt to comply with the Second Circuit’s own characterization of the Act’s meaning and purpose. The absurdity of the situation arises not from Aereo’s attempt at a “sham,” but from the outdated Copyright Act itself.

A quick glance at the rest of Judge Chen’s dissent suggests he may make some reasonable points distinguishing Aereo from the DVR service at issue in Cablevision, so I’ll withhold my own final thoughts on this case until I’ve read the Aereo opinion through.

But copyright law needs fixing. It was written during a time when the cost of copying was non-trivial, and copies were typically finite and controlled centrally by the rightsholder. There is no longer any non-trivial cost to copying. Whether between servers or from a server to your computer, the internet is nothing more or less than a giant copy-making machine. This doesn’t mean we need to weaken copyright law (although shorter terms would be more in line with copyright’s Constitutional imperative), but we do need to adapt it to the modern world.

Professor David Post, whose copyright class I took at Temple Law, signed an amicus curiae brief in this case late last year—here’s my post about it.

22 Mar 2013 // 13:01

HBO CEO wants to bundle HBO GO with your internet subscription

This is progress, although MG Siegler is right to doubt whether cable companies, many of whom are also internet service providers, would even consider such a deal.

At least HBO recognizes that the math won’t hold up against a la carte models forever.

6 Dec 2012 // 10:24

Tim Cook tells Brian Williams TV is "an area of intense interest"

Tim Cook tells Brian Williams TV is “an area of intense interest”

Ronnie Polidoro, writing at NBC:

“When I go into my living room and turn on the TV, I feel like I have gone backwards in time by 20 to 30 years,” Cook told Williams. “It’s an area of intense interest. I can’t say more than that.”

This is the only interesting bit of the article. I’m not sure why he would tease it in an interview like this one, that will ostensibly reach a large viewership of non-geeks, unless they were close to their TV solution.

As an aside, “assembling” some iMacs in the US is not the same as “making” them here, and it’s a distinction I suspect will be lost on many.

26 Nov 2012 // 11:19

The Release Windows Archaism

Frédéric Filloux at Monday Note:

As for the TV shows such as Homeland and others hits, there is not justification whatsoever to preserve this calendar archaism. They should be made universally available from the day when they are aired on TV, period. Or customers will vote with their mouse anyway and find the right file-sharing sites.

I’ve been preaching this line for a while, but Mr. Filloux articulates, by far, the best argument I’ve heard.

12 Sep 2012 // 10:00

"The Math"

“The Math”

Once again, MG Siegler nails it on HBO’s missed opportunity for direct-subscription innovation.

Most companies are so desperate to maintain anything close to an upward slant in revenue year-over-year that they never even know opportunities like this one exist.

The worst part of this situation, to me, is the fact that HBO is being repeatedly told about this opportunity and actively ignoring it merely because it doesn’t make short-term business sense.

12 Jun 2012 // 08:00

Pirates of Westeros: the untapped half-billion dollar market for Game of Thrones

Ernesto at TorrentFreak:

It’s clear that HBO (and others) prefer exclusiveness over piracy, which is a dangerous game. They might make decent money in the long run by selling subscriptions. However, this limited availability also breeds pirates, and one has to wonder how easy it is to convert these people to subscriptions once they have experienced BitTorrent.

TorrentFreak is unabashedly pro-torrent and, some might argue, pro-piracy if necessary. And they don’t exactly divulge great detail on their methodology for determining downloads and viewership. But, let’s assume for the sake of a blog post that their numbers are accurate.

Game of Thrones pulled an estimated 4.2 million legitimate (read: cable-subscribed) viewers per episode and 3.9 million illegal torrent downloads per episode during its second season. You could even, as Gizmodo's Casey Chan did, pull legitimate viewership numbers from Wikipedia and use those alongside TorrentFreak’s download numbers to come ot the conclusion that more people pirated the second season than legally watched it. I don’t think you need to massage the numbers, though:

When legitimate and illegitimate viewership are nearly or actually equal, the market has spoken.

This isn’t about prognostication. There is, at this very moment, an untapped market that rivals the current market, and HBO and other premium television content creators are ignoring it in favor of the legacy model. But maintaining cable deals is a short-term no-brainer for HBO. My own anecodtal market study turns up many torrent-happy people who assure me without blinking that they would pay for HBO every month. I don’t know what the reality would look like, but things are getting interesting.

As you may know, I’m not very good at math, but just for fun:

3.8 million illegal downloaders (according to TorrentFreak);
divided by 2 (assuming only half would ever pay);
multiplied by $20 (per month);
multiplied by 12 (months in a year);
equals $456 million (that’s almost half a billion dollars)

Yes, those numbers are dubious, but the exercise is still indicative that there is something going on here. Does HBO pull more than half a billion dollars from its current cable deals? I don’t know. If so, I suppose an independent subscription model still doesn’t make sense. Erik Kain wrote a good article at Forbes explaining why HBO just doesn’t need this untapped market.

But eventually someone will take this risk, and I wonder why it shouldn’t be HBO, with money to burn and a built-in stable of top-notch content.

30 Apr 2012 // 20:01

Hulu will eventually require a cable subscription

Our source noted that Hulu has no interest in being a first mover here and that a requirement for authentication is likely still a few years out. Hulu, however, does want to be a good partner and may have to give in to its partners’ pressure soon or later.

via techcrunch.com

This is a damn shame. It’ll be a blow to the common-sense evolution of television as a business model, and a boon to piracy.

Joe Ross

Vizio TVs spy on you, here's how to disable it