More Hairspray?

I'm not sure we need another film interpretation of Hairspray.  After all, it's already been done to perfection.

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Abused by the Broadcasters

I wasn't going to be home quite in time for the start of tonight's series finale episode of Stargate SG-1, but I had it scheduled to record on my DVR.  As luck would have it, I got home at about 8:30 (half an hour in) and started watching.

At one point, I paused to get a drink and as I got up, noticed the seekbar telling me I had already watched over half the show.  This didn't feel right, which caused me to look a little closer.  Sure enough, I had watched 23 minutes of a 30 minute recording!  Baffled at how the series finale of SG-1 could be only 30 minutes, I started looking at TV listings.  The show was listed as a full hour.

Digging further, I checked the history screen of my DVR.  There I found a little note that the recording was stopped because the broadcaster had set the CGMS-A CopyNever flags!!!  I thought maybe the tuner hardware was malfunctioning in the DVR box, so I messaged a friend who also watches SG-1 to see if he had gotten a decent recording...

A minute later a message came back: "No! Only 30mins!"

Now I'm not sure if this was intentional.  I'm not even sure who is to blame: MGM (the producer), NBC Universal (the owner of the network) or Comcast (the distributor).   Heck, maybe it's just intern night at my head-end, who knows.  Still, whether intended or not, the nuclear option was invoked, wrecking my experience of a favorite show in a way that I won't soon forget.

Now being a tinkerer, I'm sure I could go purge the VBI for future recordings.  That's not the point.  I watch the shows when they air.  I tell all my friends how great the show is.  I even watch commercials (something my friends don't understand).  A while later, I'll buy the DVDs when they come out.  I am the model lemming in the greed racket.  And still, the content providers took a shit on me today.

If they cared about me as a customer, they wouldn't let abusive technology like this into their ecosystem.  They'd realize that the legal users vastly outnumber the illegal users (especially for broadcast) and do more to make their legal users happy (including not attempting to inhibit fair use).  I don't care if it was an accident, I don't like being shit on.

This experience just strengthens my interest in finding alternate content to watch that isn't tangled up in the existing ecosystem of greed (it's greed when you look at the lobby that's consistently extended copyright terms over the past few decades).  The retards in the content industry are going to choke themselves to death by abusing their customers this way.  If they fall victim to a revolution, it will be what they deserve.

Technorati Tags: videos, you tube, copyright

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Metawriting

Trying out Windows Live Writer for the first time.  This should be interesting....