A stitch in time saves nine…
- Xbox One still has TV-like aspirations, but without cable.
- Vizio doesn’t want to sell you TVs, they want to sell industry your behavior.
- Verizon’s upcoming Internet TV service and branding both sound kind of crazy.
- Security doesn’t seem like a high priority at Roku.
- Google+ will soon be decoupled from YouTube.
- Buy a Chromecast, get a $10 Amazon credit.
Seems as if Vizio could really juice their IPO pricing if they’d just implement two obvious features:
– A camera and back-end facial recognition software to connect each and every viewer to their IRL identity.
– Some knockoff of Amazon’s Whispernet service to connect all the cheapies and free-loaders who won’t hook up their teevees to their local WiFi networks.
Two simple features could double that initial IPO pricing. And it’s win-win! Vizio’s investors and management could really cash in, and consumers would get better service.
Vizio is one of the few television manufacturers with a Plex app… Suppose another promising revenue stream would be reporting movie libraries and playback to MPAA.
“Vizio is one of the few television manufacturers with a Plex app”
FWIW, I know LG has Plex, who are a much larger manufacturer than Vizio. Dunno if there are other larger manufacturers too.
“Suppose another promising revenue stream would be reporting movie libraries and playback to MPAA.”
Short-term thinking, Dave. Short-term and small-change.
Why report customers to the MPAA to get a one-time bounty when they get shipped off to Guantanamo, never to use their Vizio sets again, when, instead, you could milk the customers year after after year by selling their behavior instead?
Gotta keep the big picture in mind. Shipping the customers off to Guantanamo is penny-wise and pound-foolish…
All my movies in my Plex library were legally obtained. They’re downloads from my Tivo. How do they show what the source of those files are.
Daniel, I was mostly being silly – although it is understood that many Plex libraries made contain content that wasn’t paid for. We’ll ignore for the moment that those downloads from your TiVo were probably decrypted in conflict with the DMCA… ;)
As to how Vizio monitors, I don’t know if they’re pulling meta data, digital fingerprints of some sort, merely enumerating app launches and times, etc.
“We’ll ignore for the moment that those downloads from your TiVo were probably decrypted in conflict with the DMCA”
As always, for whatever it’s worth, while decrypting your TiVo recordings (or DVD/Blu discs) for your own personal usage is indeed de jure illegal under the DMCA, there have been zero prosecutions or civil suits for such practices during the entire 17 year lifetime of the DMCA for any such practices, thus making it de facto legal.
In short, there is a genuine unwritten but still quite real world in practice ‘personal use’ exemption under DMCA…
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“As to how Vizio monitors, I don’t know if they’re pulling meta data, digital fingerprints of some sort, merely enumerating app launches and times, etc.”
At a bare minimum, they seem to be digitally fingerprinting the content, no matter what the input. I’d also assume they are logging the source, if they can suss it out. But their goal is advertising/tracking, not prosecution.
Personally, I find the history of the DMCA to be fascinating.
There actually was a need for some kind of legislation at the time. But as usual with US IP legislation, DMCA went far beyond reasonable. It had the potential to be quite Orwellian legislation.
However, 3 years later, the first big test case came up with DVD Jon. And once what he was doing was proved legal, it pretty much carved out a definitive ‘personal use’ clause into the DMCA legal history, thus making the living legislation much more reasonable than the written legislation.
So ever since DVD Jon, in practice, while your can’t monetize decryption, you can make the tools for free, and you can decrypt your own media. It’s a pretty reasonable compromise.
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While Dave really was just being silly, if you actually want to worry about Plex legally, which I really don’t think you need to, don’t worry about the various Plex client platforms, worry about Plex itself. Don’t forget that Plex itself fetches the metadata, and that’s the weak link to focus upon, if you really want a weak link to focus upon…