OT: TV delivery alternatives

[Travis Roy]

>
> Why not make the show downloadable for free but sell advertising and
> put the commercials in the show.  Sure, they can be ellided, but
> seriously, who's going to bother?

Yah, because writing a program to run the content through and auto- 
delete the commercials is so much harder than cracking CSS, or doing  
all the other things that have been done to get around copy  
protection? So who's going to bother? LOTS of people if I had to  
guess, and those people will make it easier and easier to do it.  
Getting DVDs to play in linux was a huge pain.. Now it can be done  
with no effort.. You're not suppose to be able to backup or copy  
DVDs, but now I can run Handbrake and have an avi of the main movie  
in an hour or so.

If you make the commercial non-skippable I'm sure somebody will find  
a way to rip it from the web (or whatever software is required to  
watch it) convert it to a normal video format without commercials and  
tons of people will download it from torrent sights.. Just like now.

People want stuff for free.. There's enough of these people to make  
getting around it worth it. Some people are cheap, some people think  
they're sticking it to "the man".