ReplayTV puts ad skipping on pause

[Julio Franco]

ReplayTV said Tuesday that its new digital video recording boxes won't include some of the features that have angered copyright holders.

The company said its upcoming ReplayTV 5500 boxes, which are expected to be released in August, will not contain the Send Show and Automatic Commercial Advance tools as the company tries to "address the concerns of copyright holders."

Read more: CNet News.

 

[Phantasm66]

ReplayTV has come under fire from major TV networks and movie studios for offering the features, which let consumers play back TV shows without commercials or send the shows to others.

Oh man, that's exactly what I want TV to do!!!

Wouldn't it just be wonderful to be able to opt out of whether your TV shows commercials or not.

Remember that, commercials aren't all that bad. Sometimes, at least the ones that I see anyway, are funny or informative. Alright, a lot of the time they are just downright annoying, but you get the picture..... Would a lot of people keep watching the adverts??? I don't know.

Certainly, its not illegal to run computer software that blocks out adds, or bans pop-ups. But I guess people perceive TV to still be such a much more powerful advertising tool. Several TV channels here fund their productions from commercials - its only because of BBC and the like that we pay a TV licence in the UK.

Perhaps it would be fair if you could block adverts on the TV for a fee (like the TV licence) and if you didn't pay the licence then there was no way to block out the adverts.

I can see why the idea of this sort of thing, and the ability to transmit over the internet or something anything you have taped from the TV to anyone else kind of frightens certain people right now. Certain people who have a vested interest in keeping things as they are.

But - is this kind of technology inevitable for home media? I mean, with Tivos and broadband and home computers almost merging with these devices to become a kind of multimedia hub for the home LAN, itsn't it likely we will get this kind of thing one way or the other soon anyway?

 

[aoj145]

It's "Automatic" Skip. You can still fast forward through commericals manualy with ReplayTV like you can on Tivo or with any other type of PVR.

ReplayTV had the feature where it would detect the commercials and automatically skip them when playing back a show. Viacom and several other broadcast companies were suing SonicBlue who used to own ReplayTV over this technology and also the ability of ReplayTV to allow people to share TV shows.

Obvioiusly sharing TV shows is against copyright law so 'duh' to ReplayTV for ever making this a feature. They should have taken it an extra step and made a DirecTV model that allowed people to get the signal for free with a built in modded smartcard. What kind of *****s would publicly sell a device who gave you the feature of pirating television shows and movies.

Anyway, the automatic skip/fast forwarding of commercials I think is going to be a growing issue. Alot of TV shows are starting to work around this by incorporating ad placements into the shows like they used to during the 1950's.

For example, watch any reality show and usually alot of the food, beverages, clothes, etc. are provided by a company and their logo is prominently displayed. Sitcoms are starting to do this more often as well. They're doing this in direct response to the growing use of PVR's knowing the more and more people are skipping the commercials.

Mark Burnett, the producer for "Survivor", gave a pretty good interview about how their show was trying to work around people with PVR's so they could still maximize their profits of selling advertising space. If I can find that article I'll post it.....