Longtime Boxcutters listeners will know that I have never been one to watch much live TV. When we started doing this show, I had three video recorders hooked up that I would variously record on or try to work through the previously recorded shows while juggling the physical tape space on multiple VHS tapes. I still have episodes of Jake in Progress and Caroline in the City I’m sure I’ll get to one day… Anyway, I digress… The reason I was a power user level time shifted viewer from way back was so as to have a ready reserve of quality viewing available at a time convenient to me, rather than the time and day convenient to the networks, and to waste less of my life waiting for the show to come back after the ads. With more than 25 years of experience, I’m a veritable guru when it comes to readying the zapping finger over the remote buttons at the first sign of going to a break and getting the right count to come back to normal speed.

So it takes something really special for an advertising campaign to start to piss me off consistently. Congratulations channel 10… You’ve done it. Continued inside »

In a ruling this morning, the High Court of Australia found in favour of IceTV in its appeal over a decision that said the EPG provider was involved in copyright infringement.

The Nine Network originally alleged that IceTV was reproducing a literary work when it published a version of the programming schedule for the network. Since then the case has been playing court tennis with decisions and appeals, a lot of waiting and potentially the chance that Goliath would indeed crush David under a giant sandal.

In a brief interview via Twitter, IceTV said that this decision could possibly open up the market to new players in the EPG space but pointed out that “EPGs are still copyrightable. [The] High Court Ruling didn’t change that.”

The Court’s conclusion was brief: “Any reproduction of the time and title information in the IceGuide was not a reproduction of a substantial part of any of the Weekly Schedules (or the Nine Database).” IceTV were awarded costs.

Read the High Court’s judgement to get into the nitty gritty of the decision.

If you’re interested in testing out the new Australian version of TiVo, they’re currently looking for Beta testers. You will get a TiVo box in your home and will have to do some homework that goes along with it but I’m sure it will be an interesting look at how it’s going to work. It will also give you some say in how it works and that’s always worthwhile.

Go here: http://www.tivo.com.au/testtivo/ to sign up.

If you do get onto the Beta testing programme, please keep us informed. Let us know what does and doesn’t work for you and how it compares to other systems you’ve used or have seen.

Very interesting article about how Packer selling up his share in Nine will lead to the free to air networks finally taking on Foxtel as a whole.

Maybe TIVO won’t as doomed as we first thought.

Seven and TiVo have come together to bring the much sought after TiVo service to Australia.

WTF? They should have done this years ago and it seems, from the media release, that it’s only going to be available for free-to-air channels.

Seven Media Group will lead the creation of the digital platform to enable TiVo’s digital video recorder and service, including the award-winning TiVo user interface. The platform will be available for use by other broadcasters and broadband content owners to create a compelling, interactive, free to air digital terrestrial television offering. The TiVo Service will be available across Australia and will include internationally recognized TiVo features like SeasonPass recordings and WishList searches and allow users to access broadband content on their TV.

Honestly, if they were going to do this, why wouldn’t they try to make it a competitor to Foxtel’s IQ? Of course Seven, along with Ten, is still to sign up to digital rebroadcast through Foxtel.

Having two platforms competing for our attention would only be better for the consumers (us) and build uptake of such technologies.

TiVo, in the US, is a subscription-based service but gives its users access to all channels (pay and FTA). Will the people not taking up Foxtel be compelled enough to dive into this? Probably not if the FTA networks aren’t going to produce some amazing content.

Also, it seems to me that a large percentage of the population who would have been the first to take up a TiVo service have already purchased a PVR, built a media centre, download torrents, or have IQ.

I’m just listening through to the last Boxcutters episode and found I pledged to reference the report on the stats of viewers watching the ads even with the option of skipping on PVR/DVR/TiVo/Fox IQs, so here it is:
From NY Times
Viewers Fast-Forwarding Past Ads? Not Always
People with digital video recorders like TiVo never watch commercials, right?

Add that to the list of urban ? and suburban ? myths.

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