Over and over again people have pointed out that one of the reasons people flock to "unauthorized" versions of content is that legitimate versions aren't available. For a decade or so, it's been odd that network TV has been generally resistant to embracing the internet. A big part of the reason, of course, is money driven, since they make so much cash from cable deals (even if their content is free over the air). The fight with Aereo, of course, is not so much about copyright as it is about retransmission fees that the networks can get from cable. So it might seem like a bit of progress to see that the networks are finally moving towards live streaming of content.

While many shows are now available online, they usually aren't available until hours (or sometimes days or weeks) after things air. And while, yes, we're now a DVR world, where people don't always watch shows when they air, there is still a sizable population of fans of shows that like to watch them in real-time. In fact, many have said that the supposedly evil internet is actually making them more interested in watching live, because they can share the cultural experience more widely via things like Twitter and Facebook. So, recognizing that reality, making it easier for people to view the content live at the same time, such as via online streaming, makes a lot of sense. Kudos to the networks for recognizing that, about a decade later than they should have.

Disney's ABC network will become the first broadcast network to stream its shows live online through an ongoing service, starting with viewers of its TV stations in New York and Philadelphia on May 14 and expanding to its other stations by the end of the summer.

Okay, that's the good part. But, given who we're talking about, of course there's a catch. There's always a catch:

Starting on July 1, Disney will only provide its WATCH ABC service to subscribers of cable, satellite and other TV subscription services that have agreements with ABC to offer the service to their subscribers in New York and Philadelphia. Subscribers must provide an authentication code to be granted access to the shows.

Later this summer, Disney said it will expand use of its WATCH ABC service to authenticated subscribers that receive its TV stations in Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Houston, Raleigh-Durham and Fresno, California.

Remember, this is free, over the air, network television we're talking about. But they're so frightened of pissing off the cable/satellite guys from whom they make boatloads of money, they won't offer the content to cord cutters -- only to people who are already paying ridiculous sums for cable/satellite TV.

Oh, and rather than make it work on any platform, it appears to be specific to certain devices:

The app will initially allow users to be able to watch the service on Apple's iPad and iPhone and on the Kindle Fire device, and later this summer on Samsung Galaxy devices.

Oh, and they're not done with the bad ideas either:

The report also claims that in the future, ABC will “withhold its most recent TV episodes from the free versions of Hulu and ABC.com, further limiting access to paying subscribers of cable and satellite providers only.”

Way to take a good idea (live streaming) and make it completely crappy and pointless again (locking it to devices and existing overpriced pay TV offerings while taking away the value for everyone else and further fragmenting the space).

Some of us had hoped that the liberation in Iraq would finally produce an example of a once clamped-down, dictatorial regime giving way to a pluralistic government in the Middle East. The theory was that after years of oppressive rule by the minority Sunni population, an inclusive government would result in functioning democracy, with all the benefits that go along with it. Chief amongst those benefits is the right to free speech, which requires allowing an open and free press. Unfortunately, that hope dwindled somewhat years back, when the Iraqi government joined the list of nations that sought to censor the internet to protect its own power. The importance of that move was probably lost on many people who failed to understand that it was an absolute negation of the freedom gained only years before.

And now that negation is apparently continuing under Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government, as they have ordered 10 television networks to be shut down on the charges that they simply don't care for their reporting.

Iraq's government ordered 10 television networks shut down Sunday, accusing them of stoking sectarian violence with "unprofessional" and "unethical" coverage of recent clashes in the country's north. Sunday's order from the Communications and Media Commission includes the Qatar-based satellite network Al Jazeera and eight outlets aimed at the country's Sunni Arab minority. Ahmed Saeed, a reporter for Baghdad Satellite TV, said the decree effectively halts his network's reporting.

This move is wrong-headed on several levels. First, if media outlets had to be shut down whenever they reported inaccurate information, even America would be left with zero media outlets. Second, considering the targets of these shutdowns, there is a roughly 100% chance that they will be seen as a stifling of speech specifically on the Sunni minority, once in power and now with a minor seat at the government table. The tone here is one of simple revenge rather than any sincere attempt at stifling bad information. Shias censoring Sunnis isn't the way to stop internal conflicts. One needs only look to Syria for evidence that stifling speech won't stop the violence.

And most importantly, moves like this will simply push Iraq back to the very arena in which its people suffered for so many years. Censorship of speech and the press is the field upon which folks like Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida play, and have been playing for longer than al-Maliki's government. They're better at it than he is. The cure is open culture, pluralism, and free speech. Push Iraq away from openness and you place it in danger of fascism and theocracy once more.

As surely as iPods will continue to outsell wax cylinders, the film and television industries are moving online. Really, the whole distinction of media that "is" or "isn't" online will sound ridiculous within a generation, and today's awkwardness is just an unavoidable transitional phase. Reluctance and momentum are keeping legacy structures intact, but in an increasingly ersatz manner that guarantees lots of anxiety at the big TV networks and movie studios. AVClub editor Todd VanDerWerff saw the signs everywhere during the recent Television Critics Association winter press tour:

For years, people who write about TV have been wondering just what the tipping point would be, when DVR usage, online streaming, and pirated viewing of TV broadcasts would become so significant that networks would essentially have to invent a new business model. The networks aren't at that point yet, but they're so close that everybody's talking about it with great confidence, as if the Internet hasn't thrown a great fear of the unknown into their souls. There's still far more money to be made in the old model, the sort of money that can still afford to produce big, ambitious shows like Revolution, as opposed to smaller-scale things like reality series and multi-camera sitcoms, than there is to be made under any new model. But the tipping point is almost here.

Is it ever. The news of big things happening with online service providers, especially Netflix, never stops pouring in. Though traditional analysts might recommend Disney start a cold war with Netflix, the companies instead recently entered an exclusive partnership to stream lots of content from Disney, Pixar and Marvel. There's only one part of that sentence I wish I didn't have to type: exclusive. It's a word that pops up all too much in recent news about evolving TV and movie business models.

Netflix has been stockpiling exclusive original content, including a lot of potential hits like the revival of Arrested Development, a new drama starring Kevin Spacey, a murder mystery produced by Eli Roth, a new Ricky Gervais series and more — all on top of deals like the one with Disney. Then there's the infamously closed-off HBO and its hoard of ultra-popular shows that can't be accessed without a full cable package plus an HBO subscription (and which also happen to be among the most pirated shows). HBO recently reached its own exclusive agreement, this time with Universal — to air the studio's films and keep them off of Netflix, along with the rest of the HBO catalogue. For at least ten years.

Paul Tassi has a good grasp on what this move really represents:

I think people are missing the larger idea of what's happening here, and that's HBO becoming the closest thing Netflix has to a direct competitor. The groundwork is already in place with the aforementioned Go service. Add in exclusive access to movies from all those studios, and $15 a month for HBO Go starts looking nearly as appealing as $15 a month for Netflix.

Basically, HBO is betting against cord-cutting, but also trying to compete in the online space, assuming that most people will keep their cable and pay extra for exclusive content plus digital access to that content. I can see that being true for a while (lots of people have both cable and Netflix), but it makes no sense in the long run. Eventually, HBO will be forced to offer some sort of online-only subscription.

But will even that be enough? Here's where we get back to the exclusivity problem. All these exclusive deals are serving to fragment a market that doesn't yet have clearly defined rules for delivery. Exclusivity is a great thing for creators to sell, and a great thing for businesses to leverage, but in this transitional phase for distribution models, it's harming everyone involved by making sure piracy retains its biggest advantage: comprehensive access. Networks have always had exclusive shows, but they all ended up in the same place — your television, delivered through a single antenna. Then later you needed not just an antenna, but a cable, to get everything. Then later you needed to pay more for specific cable channels to get certain shows — and lo and behold, those shows were among the first and most widely pirated.

The knee jerk reaction to piracy's unflagging popularity is to assume that, as the mantra goes, "people just want everything for free." But as the evidence that pirates buy more media has continued to pile up, that idea has been stripped of its credibility.

As some people have been pointing out for years, piracy's real advantage lies elsewhere: convenience, selection and availability. Piracy is currently the fullest realization of the internet's potential as a culture-machine: virtually any movie, any TV series, any song, any obscure documentary or bootlegged live performance, all accessible to anyone. No need to subscribe to multiple different providers; no release windows or geographical barriers. The fact is that no other means of obtaining media has matched piracy in terms of sheer selection and accessibility, so naturally it has never gone away, even though it has many significant flaws like spammy sites and spotty quality control.

I'm not saying everyone should hand everything to Netflix — only that service providers, studios, networks and everyone else involved need to employ a little game theory and figure out how to move the business forward to everyone's benefit. This means partnerships that allow more sharing of content, new infrastructures that make delivery and payment more seamless, and the undeniably challenging elimination of geographical restrictions and other obsolete licensing concerns. As the world moves away from the captive audience and towards a culture of infinite choice, expecting people who want comprehensive access to buy multiple different subscriptions from multiple different companies is tragically foolish. The culture machine has been built; pirates shouldn't be the only ones using it properly.

Remember all the hubbub (now there's a word I never thought I'd use; thanks a lot, aging process) over Comcast's kind of, maybe plan to spy on subscribers through their cable box as they watch TV, fold their laundry, or engage in coitus? There was quite an outcry at the time, even as Comcast said that the plan was only to have the cameras be able to recognize when different types or numbers of people were watching the tube. People just didn't feel comfortable with corporations being able to spy on them. As a result, Comcast backed away from the plan -- the people had defeated the corporation.

All, apparently, so that hackers could spy on them instead. At least, that's what some reports are saying about Samsung Smart TVs and an exploit that would allow hackers to snatch social media credentials, access any files or devices connected to the smart TV...oh, and to use the built in cameras to spy the hell out of people as they do whatever they do while watching television.

In an e-mail exchange with Security Ledger, the Malta-based firm said that the previously unknown ("zero day") hole affects Samsung Smart TVs running the latest version of the company's Linux-based firmware. It could give an attacker the ability to access any file available on the remote device, as well as external devices (such as USB drives) connected to the TV. And, in a Orwellian twist, the hole could be used to access cameras and microphones attached to the Smart TVs, giving remote attacker the ability to spy on those viewing a compromised set.

The group that reportedly discovered the vulnerability, ReVuln, proudly stated that they would not publish any information about what they'd uncovered except to paying subscribers because screw everyone else (not an actual quote). They also have a company policy, apparently, that would prevent them from working with Samsung directly on a fix or even to disclose the hole, leading me to reach the logical conclusion that Dr. Evil is apparently running that company.

Even more fun, thanks to how Samsung designed the product, chances are any fix that could be produced would be difficult to implement.

Currently, the Smart TVs offer no native security features, such as a firewall, user authentication or application whitelisting. More critically: there is no independent software update capability, meaning that, barring a firmware update from Samsung, the exploitable hole can't be patched without "voiding the device's warranty and using other exploits," ReVuln said.

The company posted a video of an attack on a Samsung TV LED 3D Smart TV online. It shows an attacker gaining shell access to the TV, copying the contents of its hard drive to an external device and mounting them on a local drive, providing access to photos, documents and other content. ReVuln said an attacker would also be able to lift credentials from any social networks or other online services accessed from the device.

In other words, customers get to wait around until Samsung can figure this thing out on their own, since ReVuln won't help them out by company policy, or risk voiding their warranty on their smart TV that has a complete lack of security features. Nicely done, everyone involved.

Despite windowing and regional restrictions being the international sign for "PIRATE ME!" many content providers continue to throw artificial locks on their offerings. Their potential viewers soon discover that "2 weeks out" in TV network time means "3 hours or less" in TorrentTime. If the content providers truly believe that Piracy = Lost Sales, why aren't they doing more to eliminate the gap between the content's debut and its worldwide spread?

It's not as if it's impossible. Another case in point: New Zealand's TV3 is chopping away at the excessive (and arbitrary) delay between Showtime's American debut of Homeland episodes and their availability locally.

TV3 is going to screen the new series of Homeland just four hours after episodes play in the US – with episodes posted to TV3.co.nz's on demand service at midnight on the day of broadcast.

The timing is actually even tighter than that. Here's the breakdown directly from TV3:

Homeland episodes will screen 3 hours 25 minutes after the Pacific Time debuts in the US. That US-NZ gap will be consistent until there's a daylight savings change. The broadcast time in each country won't change.

With ondemand, we can have each ep available from midnight the same night.

As someone in the comments points out, that's roughly the same amount of time it takes for new episodes to show up at, um, "unlicensed" distributors:

4 hours would put it on schedule with me getting it off torrents, so quite viable to watch.

Beating free at its own game often simply means eliminating legacy remnants like exaggerated delays and other restrictions. Even though this move will likely trim down the number of fans looking elsewhere for new episodes, MediaWorks (TV3's parent company) refreshingly claims converting pirates is not the "primary motivation" for this move:

"TV viewing is increasingly a community event, and online communities are global rather than local," spokeswoman Rachel Lorimer told NBR.

"By screening international shows as close to their global premieres as practical, we ensure our audience is part of the global conversation around a big show and, of course, that keeps us relevant. Those are the main motivations.

How often do you hear a spokesperson for a large corporation (content or otherwise) talk about doing what's important for the fans rather than, say, the quarterly financial statements? Many, many content providers refuse to acknowledge that the internet has made "country of origin" a non-factor while also providing an incredibly powerful platform for both distribution and "global conversation."

Lorimer also acknowledges the side benefits of catering to the customers:

"However, positive side effects may well be that our viewers save on their broadband data cap and are less likely to risk illegally downloading TV series. And a win for viewers is a win for us."

Giving viewers what they want when they want it. It's a plan so crazy it might be profitable.

Oh, HBO. You want so many people to love you. And they do, shelling out for additional offerings like HBO Go in order to take the shows they love with them on their mobile devices. And what do you do with this love? You crush it. You crush it like a heartless Lothario parting ways with a high-school girlfriend after a quick round under the bleachers, announcing "I'm going to college out of state. Call you sometime," leaving her half-dressed, teary-eyed and a bit dusty.

The issue has been knocking around for awhile, but today, the unfortunate high school girlfriend was Fred Wilson, respected blogger and venture capitalist.

I put the awesome HBO GO app on the family's iPad yesterday and tried to Airplay into our family room TV. I got audio on the TV but not video. I thought I was doing something wrong. So I rebooted everything and tried again. Same thing.

So I did a web search on the topic to see what was going on. Turns out HBO GO has disabled the video on Airplay but not the audio. That's right. They disabled the video but include an Airplay button in the app.

Why would someone do this? Why brick half the service and leave end users scratching their heads and casting about wildly over at the Apple support forums?

The "why" is the usual "why." Or rather, two usual "whys." The first "why" is somewhat of a licensing issue. HBO really doesn't want to do anything to jeopardize its relationship with the studios and cable companies, so it's limited the functionality of the Go app to mobile devices only. HBO wants you to use HBO On Demand if its current slate of programs isn't working for you. I would imagine there's a revenue stream hidden there, but taking advantage of it would mean damaging some valuable relationships. In HBO's view, Go isn't broken because fixing it would break something more valuable.

The second "why" is piracy, or rather, the fear of. From the comment thread at AVC:

Having developed these sort of systems before, I can tell you it's because AirPlay is considered an insecure protocol. It's too easy to capture the AirPlay stream and thus, in theory, create HD copies of the video. That's why they don't do it.

I've found that the cryptographic particularities don't always matter when you're in discussions with the studios. They have a list of approved DRMs and technologies and you're either on the list or you're not. Otherwise, you face at least a 6+ month in depth technical review of the stack.

TL;DR: The studios can be somewhat arbitrary in approving or disproving technologies. Last I heard, AirPlay was not approved.

Even if HBO wanted you to have this freedom (and it's not necessarily clear that it does), it still has to keep the upstream (studios) happy. And if the studios think there's a possibility that the TV you're streaming to is actually some sort of unauthorized recording device (like a VCR made out of hard drives?), it's never going to get the green light.

The next question is this: why put an Airplay button in your app if it's completely (or at least, mostly) unusable? No real answer is available. Perhaps the hope is that at some point the button will work. Or developer cruelty.

The whole situation is clearly ridiculous and highlights just how incestuous all these services (cable companies, movie studios, premium channels) are. HBO can't piss off the up and downstream sides of the equation, so it locks down anything that might be perceived as "leaving money on the table." The combined fear of piracy between these three entities (well, two of them anyway) is likely verging on "unmeasurable." This results in some very arbitrary restrictions created in the name of copy protection.

Caught in the middle is the cheerleader/consumer. HBO Go requires having an active cable account. The cable box (an additional monthly charge) only provides access to HBO On Demand (another additional monthly charge). Then there's HBO Go itself (another additional charge). It's tough to see much more than couch cushion change being left on the table in this situation.

And why do people want to stream HBO Go to their TVs? Because of HBO itself. HBO's On Demand selection is very limited as compared to HBO Go. On top of that, many users seem to feel that HBO Go's interface is better and more easily navigated. So, if it's all paid for, why is this feature bricked?

See above. Piracy fears. Fear of upsetting the balance between the three related parties. But further than that, it's the inability to recognize that users and customers will want to use your products and services in ways you never intended.

To HBO, it's likely inconceivable that someone would want to stream to a device and kick it right back to the TV set where its other content resides. But they do. And they're going to find ways to work around this limitation. When these roadblocks become easily circumvented, rather than realize that these efforts are made to make paid services work the way the customer wants them to, the content providers usually start worrying about their loss of distribution control. This worry leads to less innovation and more disabled features and bogus restrictions.

What they need to be doing (HBO, studios, cable providers) is taking long looks at these complaints and adjusting their offerings to better fit customer expectations. Consider yourself lucky you're still able to monetize nearly every aspect of these services and look to improve your current offerings. Do this often enough and you may learn to anticipate customer wants and needs. If you're looking to keep the food chain happy and trim down on "unauthorized" viewing, your best bet is to get to the "anticipation" point as quickly as you can. 

With guns and violence in the news lately, you would think that everyone involved in the chain of the firearms business would be a teensy-weensy bit more careful, from manufacturers, to retailers, all the way up to those handling the shipping and distribution. As with any other business, you have to expect to deal with some human error, but one would imagine that the firearms industry would have the tightest of controls in place right now.

As it turns out, such notions are exactly that: imagination. Or, at least that appears to be the case in the Wired story of a man from Washington D.C. who ordered a television on Amazon and was shipped a Sig Sauer 716 Patrol Rifle. For anyone keeping score at home, that's a military grade weapon. Seth Horvitz, the guy who is guilty of attempted TV-buying, is not a military grade citizen.

“When I saw some metal parts inside the box, I thought, ‘Maybe this is a TV stand or mount or something,’” Horvitz said in a phone interview with Wired. “When I realized it was an assault rifle, it was pure shock and disbelief.”

The Wired interviewer chooses not to ask Horvitz if he attempted to point the weapon at his wall and pull the trigger to see if flat-panel televisions shot out, which is disappointing. In any case, Horvitz did the responsible thing and immediately called the D.C. police, who informed him that the weapon is illegal to own in the District of Columbia. There is no word yet on whether flat-panel displays are also illegal, but I'm guessing not. 

The story then details how the mistake happened, which essentially appears to boil down to a lovely bit of insight into the shipping warehouses of UPS, in which the Label Fairy made a mistake and put two shipping labels (only one of which was correct) on the box-'o-death and allowed the box to be shipped anyway. Everyone from the guy who let it leave the warehouse to the guy who delivered the rifle to Horvitz's door apparently decided to play the new hit game "Shipping Address Coin Flip", resulting in Horvitz getting his new Rambo Halloween costume accessory. Amazon, predictably, disavowed any responsibility for the mistake, which it's looking like it has every right to do. On the other hand, when Horvitz tried to post a review of his purchase, Amazon blocked it. Admittedly, the review was hillarious, and guns and funny just don't mix:

I'm not sure what pretending all this didn't happen accomplishes from Amazon's end, other than to perhaps flip open the cover to the Streisand Effect alarm, press it, and wait for the derision to ensue.

For a few years now, we've been hearing pay TV execs (and some of their favorite Wall Street analysts) claiming that cord cutting in the US is some sort of myth, even as the numbers continue to prove otherwise. The latest stat is that, since the beginning of this year 400,000 households have cut the cord and dropped pay TV services. At what point will the TV guys realize that cord cutting is real? They still like to blame it all on the economy, but the fact is that the vast majority of these users are never going back. Until TV execs realize that's a fact, they're never going to understand how to adapt.

It's no secret that lots of internet users hate the idea of metered broadband. It adds serious mental transaction costs in using the internet ("will watching this movie actually cost me lots of money in overage fees?") and generally limits innovation by limiting what you can do online. On top of that, there's little evidence that such metered bandwidth is necessary (contrary to the claims of marketing people, when you talk to the tech people, they don't see any real congestion problems). However, the broadband providers absolutely love the caps because they basically allow them to make more money without having to actually invest in expanding their infrastructure.

So it's interesting to see that Time Warner Cable has set up a site, called Time Warner Cable Conversations, which they claim is a conversation with consumers about how to "fight rising costs." Except... they really only want the conversation to be about rising costs caused by what the TV networks charge to carry the channels. If you want to talk about fighting rising costs by arguing against broadband metering, well, too bad. The whole site is moderated and limited and it appears that only conversations about TV networks and such are allowed. That's not much of a "conversation" now, is it?

Is it really that time again? When NBC screws up its coverage of the Olympics by showing people what it thinks they want to see, rather than what they actually want to see? Every two years, the Olympics does two appallingly annoying things: makes it difficult to watch the Olympics online... and refuses to show it live on TV. In the 20th century view of NBC execs like Rick Cotton, the only thing that matters is prime time television. So they hold off and focus everything around that prime time slot... effectively pissing off everyone else. As Erick Schoenfeld noted: "The only Olympics tweets I've seen all day are from people pissed that NBC is not broadcasting the opening ceremony live."

Hell, even when they go on Twitter the Olympics can't do things right. There was a lot of buzz around the fact that NBC and Twitter teamed up to create an "Olympics" hub. Great (though some people are pointing out that NBC's own Twitter feed is now tweeting stories that it refuses to broadcast live). However, as Canada-based reporter Mathew Ingram discovered in trying to look up the Olympics Twitter hub, thanks to NBC Universal restrictions, Twitter is geoblocking access. To check it out, I visited the Olympics hub site from the US and saw this: And, then, through the magic of the internet, "transported" myself (or, at least my connection) to Toronto, where I reloaded the page... and saw this: In the end, I'm not really sure it makes a huge difference. To be honest, I'm not sure I quite understand the point of the Olympics "hub" on Twitter, but it's yet another way in which NBC Universal seems focused on restricting access, rather than enabling access. It's 20th century thinking for a company that is in desperate need of 21st century leadership.