Via Ars:
US television network ABC is concerned about losing ad revenue to DVR-loving, ad-skipping consumers, and it has a plan to stem the bleeding—deactivate the DVR fast forward button.
Yes, we just adore those annoying unskippable sections of DVD that prevent you from watching the part you actually want to watch until you’ve sat through whatever attention-taxing crap the DVD producer has tacked onto the start of their movie/series/whatever, and we’d be happy to make the same accommodation for DVR.
No, really. It’s not insane – it’s a TV Executive.
Should make that into a t-shirt.
Food for thought: How many years away is IPTV, and how many years of slow, painful death will the major TV networks endure before being snapped up by IPTV providers?
At the moment, you could create a la carte network programming using an RSS feed and BitTorrent; if there was some way of actually micropaying the creator for the right to use the content, I’d set up a network myself.
This would kill anyone who implemented it. There will be unlocked Chinese players flooding the streets, just like there are region-free DVD players. The man on the street might not care for a region-free DVD player, but you can bet that he will want an ad-skipping DVR.
Oh also, re IPTV, my flatmates and I just watch youtube on the MCE. We have ADSL2+ so we can stream anything with no buffering. SpongBo, you could have that too if you applied some pressure.
Yeah. Hokay. I am RIMmed.