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Rekrul
join:2007-04-21
Milford, CT

Rekrul

Member

Disgusting...

It's disgusting the way companies have to pretend that TV shows are still unique, one-time only events. If a subscriber doesn't record a particular show, they've missed it. Despite the fact that probably 500,000 other subscribers DID record it. Not to mention the horribly inefficient system they're forced to use where each subscriber is allotted space for their one individual copy of a show, rather than just keeping one copy and letting people access it.

The most efficient and intelligent system would be to just record a copy of everything and let subscribers watch it up to a week later. Of course they can't do that because of copyrights and because apparently the world as we know it would end if they did that...

baineschile
2600 ways to live
Premium Member
join:2008-05-10
Sterling Heights, MI

baineschile

Premium Member

Um. That exists.

Its called OnDemand.

Bubble/Bursted.
Rekrul
join:2007-04-21
Milford, CT

Rekrul

Member

said by baineschile:

Um. That exists.

Its called OnDemand.

Bubble/Bursted.

Not every show is available on demand. For example, my friend is a big fan of the show Criminal Minds and that's not available on demand from Comcast.
JoelC707
Premium Member
join:2002-07-09
Lanett, AL

JoelC707 to Rekrul

Premium Member

to Rekrul
Data Deduplication: »en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Da ··· lication

Basically they can let each and every user store individual copies of the recordings. In the background it'll only store one copy and the rest are just glorified shortcuts/pointers. It's not to the point of the OnDemand style access where they would just let everyone watch every show for various reasons but it's not as inefficient as you might think.

It's actually more efficient than that if they use block level dedupe. If it goes down to the block level, every common block can be deduplicated. Things like common commercials can be deduplicated further saving space.
Rekrul
join:2007-04-21
Milford, CT

Rekrul

Member

said by JoelC707:

Data Deduplication: »en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Da ··· lication

Basically they can let each and every user store individual copies of the recordings. In the background it'll only store one copy and the rest are just glorified shortcuts/pointers. It's not to the point of the OnDemand style access where they would just let everyone watch every show for various reasons but it's not as inefficient as you might think.

There's just one problem with that; The studios argue that if there's only one copy of the program being watched by multiple people, regardless if they specifically requested to record that program, then it constitutes a public performance of that work and is a violation of copyright.

This is why Cablevision's network DVR service stores a unique copy of each program for each subscriber who wants to record it. In court they successfully argued that this wasn't a public performance of a single work because each subscriber has their own unique copy of the program and only this copy is streamed to the subscriber who recorded it. In effect being no different than a traditional DVR, except for its physical location.

This is why it was ruled legal and why Comcast will have to duplicate their horribly inefficient system if they want to avoid being sued out of existence by the studios.

It's also why Aero has to have individual antennas for each subscriber rather than just putting up one antenna and connecting everyone to it.

Copyright law today is a minefield and you have to really contort new technologies to not get blown up.
Terabit
join:2008-12-19

Terabit

Member

And only in America will there be somebody look at this and say, yep this is rational. It's absurd yet we will continue to use this model as that's how we roll.